Month: November 2018

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Book Reviews

Memories of My Melancholy Whores–a book review

García Márquez, Gabriel. Memories of My Melancholy Whores (New York: Penguin, 2014), translation.

The author of this short novel, only 128 delicious pages long in English (I read the Spanish version, see Spanish review below) is one of the finest Latin American writers in recent times. He wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1967, which catapulted him to international fame, allowing him, at the same time, to introduce his writing style, later known as “magical realism.”  Memories is one of his last works; he died in 2014.

Memories feels more like a biographic fragment than a work of fiction. Even so, we don’t have steamy hot, tropical, bawdy house scenes that might stir our more salacious thoughts. What we do have is the tale of a “dirty ol’” bachelor who lives alone in a back country tropical riverside town that feels Colombian (Garcia-Marquez was Colombian); the old man falls in love with a young prostitute.

Not having fallen in love before, the life of this decrepit eighty-year-old man turns upside down giving the author the opportunity to spin an amusing and intimate tale of a relationship constrained on all sides. One of the most enjoyable scenes describes this senile old fellow sleeping next to his adorable girl as if they were brother and sister, he being unable to do much more.

Memories also gave me the renewed opportunity to appreciate the author’s ability with the Spanish language. With sublime skill he conjures phrases and expressions that wrap this wistful human story in a luxurious linguistic mantel. This book is pleasant and poignant at the same time.

Memoria de mis putas tristes. (Nueva York: Vintage Español: 2004). Esta novelita de 109 páginas deliciosas me suena más como un trozo biográfico que una obra de ficción. Es más, no tenemos aquí un holgorio ardiente de visitas a prostíbulos tropicales que nos exciten nuestros pensamientos lascivos. Lo que si tenemos es una crónica de un “viejo verde” solterón que vive solo en un pueblo provinciano ribereño, se podría decir, de ensueño, al estilo garciamarqueño, y que se enamora de una joven prostituta.

No habiéndose enamorado antes, la vida de este achacoso ochentón salta para caer boca abajo, lo que permite al autor ofrecernos un relato intimo y gracioso de lo que llega a ser una relación amorosa marcada con grandes limitaciones. Una de las escenas más divertidas nos permite imaginar a este hombre chocho gozando solo con poder acostarse al lado de la muchacha que adora toda la noche como si fueran hermanos, porque no pudo hacer más.

La obra también permite apreciar la habilidad de don Gabi para esgrimir el español con una sublime pericia que le confiere a sus frases y expresiones un lujo lingüístico que arropa su fábula humana. Fue una de sus últimas obras. Es divertido este librito y acogedor a la vez.

 

 

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Book Reviews United States We Became Mexican American, a book

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis–a book review

Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2018), with a new Afterword. With good reason, Hillbilly Elegy received widespread attention when it was first published. Put on the market by Harper in 2016, it coincided with the rise of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and his getting elected soon thereafter. His popularity was attributed to his being able to speak on behalf of poor white Americans, especially those from the south who had supposedly been neglected by Democratic administrations. To my knowledge, Mr. Trump did not use the term, “hillbilly” to refer to his loyal supporters but Vance identifies hillbilly people as Trump supporters. Understanding them came to mean also understanding Trump’s inveterate supporters.

In any case, this book offers a penetrating insight into the people who live in Appalachia, mostly under-privileged whites who allegedly claim Scot-Irish descendence, a cultural note discussed far too briefly. The author writes his book in a compelling and disarming manner, boldly revealing personal family information, sometimes in a startling way. This combination helped give Hillbilly Elegy considerable attention.

The author tells us that he grew up, surrounded by his extended family, in one of the many hollows (“hollers”) scoured into the Allegheny Mountains near Jackson, Kentucky, and so his book puts a spot light on his mountain people, a harsh light. Many of them manifest varying levels of paranoia, to tell the truth. His grandfather’s obsession with guns and a willingness to draw one from behind his back at the slightest threat, his grandmother’s use of foul language and his mother’s abuse of drugs and her chronic inability to keep a husband or boyfriend are examples of this neurotic-paranoiac behavior. In addition, many of the author’s relatives and friends are described as “welfare queens,” some who “drive a Cadillac,” allergic to holding a job, and hostile to the world outside, interest in politics being unquestionably peripheral.

I concluded that a large part of the behavior described in Hillbilly is reminiscent of many poor families, working class and non-working, including Mexican American families and other minority families of color in the United States. Hillbilly thus confirmed in my mind that skin color and cultural antecedence are only casual differences among underprivileged people and they all feel put upon by the people who do not live on the edge. Except for a handful of words, here and there, the author does not make these cross-cultural observations.

Another parallel with minority families is that Mamaw, the author’s grandmother, was able to recognize a gem in the rough, despite her educational and social limitations: the gem is the author, himself. She nurtures him, because his parents couldn’t, even when she skewers him with unexpectedly obscene language, and helps him become somebody (a Yale lawyer and author!). This happens in minority communities too where someone discovers a child possessing enough internal fire to escape the ghetto, in this case, to flee the “hollers” of Kentucky. This book is an elegy to the author’s grandmother, most of all.

Mamaw takes young Vance to live in Middletown, Ohio. On page 252 the author writes that he felt like a “cultural emigrant” in Ohio. He came to regard white middle-class people in Middletown as aliens and so the latter half of Hillbilly Elegy offers an account of his painful assimilation into White Middle-Class America.

Blacks, who fled the South in the 1940’s, landing in places like Detroit, felt something similar, just more extreme. Immigrants, Mexican or otherwise, know fully well what it feels to be a “cultural emigrant,” as I show in my own book, Becoming Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream.

Hillbilly Elegy helps us understand less privileged white Americans to be sure. But, as I note, it is a study of poor people anywhere. And, for this reason it also contains cross-cultural implications of the kind I identify here that many emigrants from Appalachia might not relish.

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Book Reviews United States

George Washington: Indispensable Man, a review

Flexner, James Thomas. Washington: The Indispensable Man (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1974) The author wrote four volumes of the life of our first president in the late 1960’s and condensed them into these 423 pages, but the text is “almost all together new,” he advises in the “Preface.” Now deceased, the author received the highest awards for his work and so I imagine that his knowledge and appreciation for George Washington remains unequaled to this day.

I gained a special appreciation for the father of our country thanks to the author’s emphasis on the personal aspects of George Washington’s life. For example, I was touched to learn that almost everyone he met, from the time he was a young man to his last years, trusted him almost immediately for his honesty and good will, and fully expected him to execute a plan, whatever it might have been. His famous crossing of the Delaware, as commander of the bedraggled American forces, to surprise the British at Trenton, is probably the best-known example of how his men loyally followed him even when he had been losing numerous battles. He was not a trained warrior, but he was not afraid to take the lead and do his best for his upstart nation. He stressed heavily on this account.

Washington owned slaves who worked on his plantation, Mount Vernon. Contradictorily, however, the author portrays him as a man so concerned about the welfare of others that he refused to sell his slaves to avoid separating family members, something that made him stand out in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Consequently, Mount Vernon gradually loaded up with a surplus of slaves that simply added to Washington’s mounting indebtedness. This situation came to an end after his death only when his wife liberated them all, at a high cost, to be sure. Flexner’s knowledge of George Washington is outstanding, of course, in part because of his secure familiarity with Washington’s writings, letters, mostly. I found the author’s writing elliptically old-fashioned throughout, but it was worth turning every page. His bibliography must be the best up to 1974, the date of publication.

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Trump United States

Mr. Trump is a mini-dictator desperately trying to rise to the status of big-dictator.

Donald Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions today, November 8, 2018, is nothing else but the first step to get rid of Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel investigating Trump’s unlawfulness.

Mr. Trump is a mini-dictator desperately trying to rise to the status of big-dictator. His constant battle with the press (Trump’s removing Jim Acosta of CNN from the White House press pool, for example) and his many negative encounters with his own Justice Department (not only Jeff Sessions but many others) are just two examples.

We must stay alert and give strength to our national institutions that can protect us from a Trump dictatorship. We must also press our senators to create a barricade against despotism. Write to them today and tell them: “STAND UP TO TRUMP! PUT UP A BARRIER AGAINST DESPOTISM!