Reviewed by Tori Rego
The well-worn “a stranger comes to town” narrative genesis is given new life in Lake Markham’s debut novel, Lo Siento. The main character, as much as there can be said to be one, is its titular town. Lo Siento is a tiny, off-beat community in nowhere Texas held together by a bar or two, a priest, an annual cook-off, and a shared memory of the day the cowboys came to town.
This memory haunts Lo Siento like a shared mirage at the receding horizon on the dusty road leading out of town. In this lonely place, a stranger finds a temporary calling as a bartender, a jewel thief, and a motel owner come to blows, and natural and man-made catastrophes come to a startling head.
What is most inspiring about Lo Siento is what the narrative chooses to hide. It isn’t until halfway through the novel that our narrator's identity is revealed. Each of the characters hold secrets at stubborn distance from one another. They pass through each other’s lives like tumbleweeds.
The character Buck Owens (no, not the American country singer-songwriter) stands out as a singular and memorable achievement in the book. Buck Owens is simultaneously the embodiment of Lo Siento and the aspirational myth of the lone American artist. Buck Owens is a Las Vegas showman, a novelist, a self-help guru, a trucker, and an entrepreneur—a superbly American brand of renaissance man, struggling to resist the constraints of identity, class, and capital. It’s impossible not to root for him, but he’s also impossible to understand. More than a man, he is the American compulsion to labor towards greatness.
Toward the end of the novel, one of the only named female characters, Shelley, expresses a central sorrow connecting Lo Siento’s disparate characters: “by the time you’re scared to lose something, it means you must have already. At some point along the way.” What person living on American soil in the 21st century wouldn’t resonate with this sentiment? So much has been lost, and, as Lo Siento reminds us, we have so much yet to lose. Perhaps, like Buck Owens, it wouldn’t be ill advised to get in our car, turn the ignition, and go see what there is to see of this strange land, as long as it lasts.
Lo Siento is available at bookstores or through the Apocalypse Confidential website.
Tori Rego is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago where she co-hosts the monthly reading series Written on a Napkin. Her poetry chapbook Briefly, Gently was a finalist for the Chicago Reader's award for Best New Poetry Book by a Chicagoan in 2024. A full list of her published work can be found on her website at torirego.com.
