Xita Rubert’s The Key Biscayne Affair, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches, is a literary coming-of-age novel that explores the uncertain territory between childhood memory and adult understanding. Through an unnamed narrator’s recollections of a summer in Florida, Rubert examines the ways parental neglect can disguise itself as freedom and how a child’s devotion to a parent can make it difficult to recognize when something is wrong. The prose drew me in, but the story’s reluctance to clarify its events left me wanting more from this short, elusive novel.
Originally from Spain, the narrator and her brother go to live with their father in Boston for a year following a custody battle. Halfway through their stay, their eccentric father, a philosophy professor, gets a wild hair and decides to relocate them to Miami without bothering to inform their mother. On Key Biscayne, a gated island off the coast, he finds himself welcomed into a wealthy social scene that seems to encourage his unconventional behavior. For the children, the move brings a change of scenery and a different kind of education, one shaped less by their father’s professed intellectual interests than by his disregard for the responsibilities of parenthood. As his antics become more reckless, the children are drawn further into his world, while their mother’s calls from Spain go unanswered.
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