Lists of food, of furniture, of illustrated Mexican pulp novels called fotonovelas ( Women - They're All Alike! Don't Make Me Commit a Craziness). Vendors, townspeople, tourists, everyone gathers around us to see who it is Mother is calling a big caca, a goat, an ox, a fat butt, a shameless, a deceiver, a savage, a barbarian, un gran puto. The corn-on-the-cob vendor ignores his customers and moves in for a better view, as if we're the last episode of a favorite telenovela. Guests peer out half-naked from the windows of third-class hotels, customers at fruit-drink stands twist around on barstools, taxi drivers abandon their cars, waiters forget their tips. In two languages Mother hurls words like weapons, and they thump and thud their target with amazing accuracy. Here's a scene on an Acapulco street when Lala's mother tears into the wayward husband:

So as to fill in the gaps.' In a disclaimer that begins the novel, Cisneros describes herself as a retailer of healthy lies, inventing what she doesn't know and exaggerating what she does, sautéing the real in the saucepans of memory.Ĭisneros is also a virtuoso at piling on the descriptive detail, creating verbal snowballs that gather speed as they roll down the page. Lala says she's merely adding 'healthy lies. Cisneros interrupts the action to have her narrator, a Chicago-born Mexican-American girl nicknamed Lala, address her paternal grandmother's complaints that Lala is getting the older woman's story all wrong. In one sense this exuberant novel is a tribute to the figure of the storyteller, with the question of how to tell a story cropping up repeatedly. With Caramelo she delivers on the promise of those earlier books, producing a multigenerational family saga that represents a major and I think permanent contribution to Mexican-American literature. And, yes, so much humanity.Ĭisneros is best known for the episodic short novel The House on Mango Street and the story collection Woman Hollering Creek. There's certainly much in this long-awaited 'big' novel from San Antonio's Sandra Cisneros. 'Enough,' comes the weeping reply, 'but not too much.' ' Sí,' her companion says, ' tanta miseria, but also so much humanity to make up for the cruelty.' 'So much misery in the world,' another character weeps, elsewhere in the book.

Book caramelo