Menéndez wants you to see the unit itself as a character that connects the tenants’ stories, a repository of different kinds of energy ... The connections make clearer sense when you realize the ideas in Menéndez’s inanimate narrative voice derive from psychology and the human need for a home base ... Menéndez has given life to a place both indistinct and emblematic.
Showcasing Menéndez’s signature sensuous language, dreamlike imagery, ambitious experimentation, and political awareness honed by her decades as an award-winning journalist, The Apartment is a tour de force by an author working at the peak of her powers ... Plumbs the depths of existential, life-and-death questions ... Menéndez opens her narrative with Indigeneity, restoring to literary view Miami’s inhabitants who long preceded Spanish conquest. In so doing, she problematizes the dominant Western concept of linear time. Elegiac, the novel begins with a scene not long before the moment of colonial conquest.
Haunting ... Menéndez introduces the captivating tenants of apartment 2B, who inhabit a vividly described, mutable city ... The novel explores many facets of loneliness and isolation and the feeling of being othered and far from home, and it illustrates the often life-saving importance of community.
Ambitious if diffuse ... A late foray into magical realism feels a bit hackneyed, and some of the time periods are more evocatively described than others. Still, Menéndez’s nesting-doll narrative serves as a thoughtful meditation on the transient nature of home.
