Interesting Characters, But the Issues are Not So Black and White"Tijuana Straits" is an understated tale of environmental ruin and personal redemption along the wild, untamed border of California and Mexico. This is not so much a "surf noir" book like Kem Nunn's other novels "Tapping the Source" and "The Dogs of Winter." It is more of a novel about environmental impact on an area and its people.Sam "The Gull" Fahey, former surf legend and prison inmate, lives in a trailer within walking distance of the U.S./Mexican border. He spends his days tending his worm farm, doing speed, saving indigenous birds and hunting down dangerous stray dogs for the bounty money. He surfs no more because his home break along the Tijuana Straits has long since been poisoned by the toxic runoff from factories based just on the other side of the border in Tijuana.Magdalena is a smart Mexican woman, a survivor who saw her mother drowned by the Mexican government opening a dam's spillway to flood out shantytown residents to make way for new corporate development. She now works for a lawyer compiling evidence against toxic factories on the Tijuana side of the border. Magdalena's research begins to hit too close to home for the bad guys, who attempt to burn her files and then hire the horrific Armando to kill her. Magdalena is driven away from Tijuana by the murder attempt and she ends up being saved and nursed back to health by Fahey, a shell of a man himself. She convinces Fahey to help her, and sends him back down to Tijuana to retrieve her files. Meanwhile Armando is headed north across the border, looking for her with an aim to completing his unfinished business.Nunn uses his skill as a writer to give depth to all of his main characters. Take the villain Armando for example. Armando is fearsome, yes, but he is no cookie cutter. We go back into his past to see what made him that way. He wanted to escape the poverty of his upbringing and become a boxer, but instead ends up working in a factory in Tijuana gluing leather covers onto car steering wheels. Armando finds a wife in the factories as well, but the fumes in their work environments are so toxic that their son is born with deformities and dies. Armando escapes his pain by sniffing glue and using various other drugs. When his wife finally leaves him he traces her to a woman's shelter where Magdalena volunteers and he ends up blaming her for his troubles.One problem I had with "Tijuana Straits" is Kem Nunn's love of long sentences. Sometimes one sentence goes on and on for half a page or more, getting harder and harder to follow with each line. I found this tendency distracting, especially in the second half of the book. Also, if you are a fan of surfing from the author's other books, be advised that there is very little of it here.I believe that many like "Tijuana Straits" because of its environmental message. Other than bringing to light these problems along the U.S. / Mexico border area in California, however, very little is actually done about them. I would have liked to see something more accomplished by the end. Also, more of a balanced discussion of the Mexican maquiladoras (manufacturing operations in a Free Trade Zone) would have led to a stronger, more convincing story rather than the one-sided "take my word for it - factories are bad" angle Nunn mostly takes. The issue is not so completely black and white as this.
kem nunn's a cool motherfucker but this review's really a love letter to resident goodreads badass Donald Powell. yup. i'm always on the lookout for great contemporary american crime fiction, for stuff that can stand up to the old guys. i've checked out all the big names -- connolly, leonard, pelecanos, price and all the other cats who write for the wire and, as much as i love the genre, i just can't really get into these guys. there's some good stuff, for sure, but nothing GREAT. nothing that spooks the shit outta you in the middle of the night, nothing that makes you happy when you have to crap so you can be alone with the book, nothing that gives you that thrillingly evil 'the world is a horrible place and we are a vile species' feeling... well, none of 'em, save james ellroy. the one genre-busting genius-goddamn-writer who, in my opinion, bests all his elders and predecessors. and i was alone with ellroy for a while. which was fine. y'know, fine in the 'gang-raped by Satan and a slew of demons' way. then donald tells me to check out don winslow and i read power of the dog and it's tragic and magnificent and fun and dark and great. and also the best book i've read on the mexican drug trade and our phony 'war on drugs' and NAFTA and san diego and tijuana and juarez, etc... a few days ago donald tells me to read kem nunn, so i pick up tijuana straits. well, the book is wildly uneven and the ending chase could use some work, but nunn's there. in the club of great american contemporary crime writers. for sure. his contemporaries, those more highly regarded crime scribblers, they don't have shit on this guy: the overall construction and conception of this book goes places they don't even know exist. there are sentences and passages and whole sections (armando's back story!!!) that are so goddamn gloriously amazing and nunn's sense of place and locale is so perfect and the badass hopeful loser of a lead character he created... it was all so great that i'm about to tear through some of his other books. i'll end with this: those kids that donald's wife keeps popping out are pretty damn lucky. goddamn, are those kids gonna be flooded with great shit.
Do You like book Tijuana Straits (2005)?
ACCURATE STAR RATING= 3.5why did I read this book?I bought it at the San Diego State University book store. what caught my eye was a gold sticker on the cover that read "local author." the cover itself wasn't very appealing to me, personally.PROS:the writing is actually pretty good! I was pleasantly surprised considering I'd never heard of him before. I like that I can relate to the location in this book and I even went and hunted down some of the location sites in Imperial Beach. the story moves along pretty well and the characters are likeable, for the most part. Kem Nunn has a good grasp on local character, biology, and urban setting. I appreciate that he described the run-down conditions of Tijuana, Mexico, without degrading the people. CONS: the use of the phrase "in point of fact." I like this phrase. I think I first encountered it while reading Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, but don't quote me on that. HOWEVER, Nunn uses this phrase like 4, 5 times. I'm not entirely sure why this bugs me, but it does. The ending is a bit vague. I don't want to describe the ending in too much detail, but the death of a character is by water-borne illness and I wanted more detail and interaction with the character at this stage. also, there was a very detailed description of a character's career in Mexico, but it didn't ever really tie in with the main story to me. he could have been a little less wordy and had a better book.VERDICT:overall a decent read and especially interesting for people who live in the San Diego area.
—Carolanne
I live about 20 miles from where the action of Kem Nunn's "Tijuana Straits" takes place. Mr. Nunn's feel for the place is extraordinary. The plot of the novel is interesting and the characters of Sam Fahey and Magdalena are rich and well drawn. Magdalena is a young woman from Mexico trying to uncover environmental crimes committed by factory owners. Sam is a famed surfer with a criminal past and a heart of gold. Yeah, a bit cliché but still effective. The ending is top notch.Yet, I could hardly finish this book. One reason is that I have no interest in surfing whatsoever. I find all this mumbo jumbo about the Mystic Peak, the Third Notch, the one great wave just boring. Sam could be a state champion in knitting or embroidery, and it would be equally interesting to me. This is, of course, my bias, and I am sorry for it. The main reason for how hard I struggled to read this book is the exalted language. The book is ridiculously overwrought. Pages upon pages of language when one sentence would suffice.Other readers may find this book great and I will understand them. I can't stand books that use ten times more words than needed (a purely personal pet peeve).Two and three quarters stars.
—Lukasz Pruski
Interesting but wordy story of a "Big Lebowski" type surfer dude/worm farmer living by the beach along the California Tijuana border who finds a Mexican woman, Magdelena, fleeing for her life after her activist legal confrontation with polluting factory management in Tijuana. The action really picks up in the last half of the story.All of Nunn's characters (Protagonist/loser Fahey, heroine/activist, Magdelena, and the pathetic killer, Armando) are wonderfully developed and interesting. His writing has a real feel for the atmosphere he creates.
—Michael
