Loosing My Espanish
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A heartbreaking, funny, and brilliantly inventive novel with “a narrator who erupts and disrupts the pavements of the Cuban-American experience by showing us that the most accurate, if not truthful, fact comes from the memory of the impassioned heart.” —Helena María Viramontes, author of Under the Feet of Jesus
“A novel that exists in a realm where beauty and memory and longing are one.” —Junot Díaz, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize– winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Delossantos is about to lose his job as a teacher at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. Rather than go quietly, he embarks on a valiant last history lesson that chronicles the flight from Cuba of his makeshift extended family. Evoking the struggle between nostalgia and the realities of the Cuban Revolution with both grit and lyricism, he inspires his students with an altogether dazzling reinterpretation of the Cuban-American experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Carrillo's energetic but uneven debut, scar Delossantos 41, alone and losing his job as a history teacher at a Chicago parochial school has 34 days left to educate his uninterested students about what he holds to be the essentials of life: family, love and Cuba, the "Isla Belle, Belle Caribe." The sermons that follow mimic his ersatz philosophical view of history for him, it is "space, like a series of rooms that we can just as easily step into as out of" as they jolt from subplot to subplot while telling, in extravagant Spanglish, the history of his native island and, alternately, the tale of his and his mother's struggles as they fled Cuba for the U.S. when he was a child and Batista had fallen. Vivid local color abounds: Delossantos's mother, Am , who owns a beauty shop, makes a divine flan con guayaba that everyone envies. Elegiac passages describing Am 's decline as she battles Alzheimer's as the book opens, she has recently forgotten about a pot of water she put on the stove to boil and burned down her "little casa blanca" are also genuinely moving. On the whole, however, this inchoate novel is plagued by Carrillo's clunky transitions and muddled syntax, which, while echoing the labyrinthine prose of Reinaldo Arenas, drown the reader in a flood of semicolons, dashes and narrative digressions.
