Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State. As Lala’s friend Viva says, “You’re the author of the telenovela of your life. In one of many entertaining footnotes, vehicles for historical and biographical background as well as the author’s opinions, she insists that those TV soap operas merely “ Mexican life.” The only way to cope is with a robust sense of humor. (The author riffs playfully throughout on the double meaning of destino, as either “destiny” or “destination” it’s hard to imagine that the simultaneous Spanish-language edition will be as stylistically original as this casually bilingual text.) Melodrama abounds, and the narrator doesn’t disdain her tale’s links to Mexico’s famed telenovelas. All swirling together like the stripes.” Wearing it years later to her parents’ 30th anniversary, Lala brings the fringe to her lips and tastes “cooked pumpkin familiar and comforting and good, reminding me I’m connected to so many people, so many.” Cisneros’ keen eye enlivens descriptions of everything from Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street flea market to Soledad’s sun-stroked house on Destiny Street.
Soledad comes from a family of shawl-makers, and her most significant possession is a rebozo caramelo, a silk shawl whose striped design, when she unfurls it after her husband’s death, evokes “the past.
These are Lala’s parents, and Lala then rolls the narrative back, goaded by a scolding second voice whose identity we learn later, to tell us how a desolate, abandoned girl named Soledad became the Awful Grandmother. Narrator Lala begins with a particularly dreadful trip during which “the Awful Grandmother” reveals a shameful secret from her favorite son’s past to humiliate her detested daughter-in-law. A sprawling family saga with a zesty Mexican-American accent from Cisneros, author of, most recently, Woman Hollering Creek (1991).Įvery summer, all three Reyes brothers drive with their wives and children from Chicago to Mexico City to visit their parents.
0 kommentar(er)
