Caramelo [Paperback]

Sandra Cisneros (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2003

Every year the three Reyes sons and their families drive south from Chicago via Route 66 to the home of the Awful Grandmother and the Little Grandfather on Destiny Street in Mexico City. From the back seat of her father's red Chevy station-wagon, our storyteller Lala loves to witness the crossover from endless Texas to flamboyant Mexico, the switch from truck stop donuts to street vendors with corn on the cob, the smell of hot tortillas and the sting of roasting chillies in the throat and eyes. The youngest of many cousins, Lala is also the most curious. Did the Little Grandfather really lose those very ribs in a terrible battle? And why is the Awful Grandmother's special treasure, her caramelo silk shawl, the colour of burnt milk candy, still unfinished ? As Lala grows older she learns the colourful tales and 'healthy lies' behind the official family legends. Cisneros is a great story teller, a tantalizing conjurer of tastes and atmospheres - and the creator of characters who stomp and dance off the page into your heart.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros's first novel since her celebrated The House on Mango Street, weaves a large yet intricate pattern, much like the decorative fringe on a rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl. Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya's grandmother's prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is "the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven.... Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. Celaya gathers and retells, in over 80 chapters, the stories that reinforce her family's, and subsequently her own, identity as they travel between the U.S.-Mexican border and within the United States. Rich with sensory descriptions and animated conversations and peppered with Mexican cultural and historical details, this novel can hardly contain itself. Also an acclaimed poet, Cisneros writes fiercely and thoroughly, and her characters enter and exit the page with uncommon humanity. Although the book is long--over 400 pages plus a relevant U.S.-Mexico chronology--in many ways it's not long enough. The world of the 20th-century Mexican family, and of the Reyeses in particular, is as complicated, timeless, and satisfying as our own family stories. --Emily Russin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

With the ability to make listeners laugh out loud with her humor, get lumps in their throats with her poignancy and leave them thinking about her characters long after they've hit the stop button, Cisneros is a master storyteller and performer. Her sweeping tale of the Reyes family, with the charmingly innocent Lala Reyes at its center, moves from 1920s Mexico City and Acapulco to 1950s Chicago, all the while grounding the family's whimsical events with "notes" to help readers understand the greater significance of, say, a nightclub singer who snagged Lala's grandfather's heart or the Mexican government's initiative to build a network of highways throughout the country. Cisneros (The House on Mango Street) reads her flowing text in an often ebullient voice, recounting the sights and sounds of Mexico City's boisterous streets or performing one of the many grand-scale arguments Lala's parents have. Her voices are marvelous. She perfectly portrays the Awful Grandmother's bitterness (the old lady loved to remind her son, "Wives come and go, but mothers, you have only one!") and sweetly croons the birthday songs Lala and her brothers sing to their father. This is a treat of an audio, combining a fantastic narrative with an equally excellent reading.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks (July 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747561605
• ISBN-13: 978-0747561606
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,619,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award, and of fellowships .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A charmer, October 1, 2002

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caramelo (Hardcover)

Exhibiting a humor that is at once Mexican, American, and Mexican-American, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of an immigrant family that is as universal and yet particular as these stories are. Lala Reyes is the seventh child of the family and the only girl. They live in Chicago, where her dad and his two brothers run an upholstery shop. There are cousins (my favorites are three brothers named Elvis, Byron, and Aristotle), looong caravan-style car trips to Mexico City to visit the Awful Grandmother, and some snooping into the past by Lala.

The Awful Grandmother was once a girl called Soledad, whose father was a dyer of rebozos, the traditional Mexican shawl, and whose mother was renowned for her intricate knotting of the fringes. All that remains of their art in the family is a rebozo with unfinished fringes, a caramelo, a shawl dyed in stripes the colors of caramel, licorice, and vanilla which appears around the shoulders of generations of women.

The plot winds and circles, often ending up in surprising places. "Caramelo" is a long book, but it could have been longer--many of the minor characters are unfinished and there's a sense that Cisneros had such a wealth of stories to tell that she simply could not stuff them all between these covers. The writing is so bright and fine I would have been happy to spend another hundred pages with the Reyes family.

My sole quibble with "Caramelo" is the extensive use of Spanish words and phrases. If readers do not speak Mexican Spanish, will they miss the full flavor of the novel? Would we be as willing to accept a book peppered with this much Hungarian or French? I would hate to think that some readers would find this a turn-off and feel excluded from Sandra Cisneros' rich and delightful story.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ms. Cisneros ensnares the reader with her warm, wry humor, October 15, 2002

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caramelo (Hardcover)

CARAMELO, the gorgeous new novel by Sandra Cisneros, begins with a portrait taken on a summer trip to Acapulco, one of those spontaneous group shots offered by photographers who comb the beach to record memories, real or manufactured. All of the members of the Reyes family are there...all except for Lala, the youngest, forgotten a few yards away as she happily makes sandcastles. And so Lala spends the rest of the book painting a portrait of her own.

It's impossible not to love an author who names her characters "the Awful Grandmother," "Aunty Light-Skin" and "Uncle Old." Cisneros's warm, wry humor has been on display since THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, and in her latest blended book (equal parts American and Mexican influence), she ensnares us again. This is Lala's story, first and foremost, but it's also the story of so many other things --- of growing up in two cultures, of growing up in general, of family life and daily upheaval, of class and racial strife. The Reyes family travels south to Mexico City each summer to spend time with Inocencio's parents, his heavy-handed mother and henpecked father. Thirteen running, screaming kids caught between the Chicago culture of their daily lives and the Mexican roots of their parents. Three daughters-in-law left to stew in their own juices when mama's around. One hundred reasons why, we soon learn, everything is not OK.

We watch things unfold through Lala's eyes, even the things she was not there to witness. She is an always-precocious narrator. Of Aunty Light-Skin's secretarial job, for example, we're told that she wears beautiful cocktail dresses and high heels, and is picked up each day by her big-shot boss. Lala overhears her mother and aunts' ridicule, but does not spell out the details. Readers can draw their own conclusions about Aunty's "profession." Our narrator admits her unreliability --- she remembers things that didn't happen, forgets some that did, and puts others into a different context. Of a disagreement with her mother, she pictures a dusky confrontation. But Lala knows it took place during the day.

Lala also guides us through history. She tells the Grandmother's story, how she became "Awful," before she became proud. She tells of her grandfather's great lost love, who was most certainly not her grandmother. She fills holes with her own romantic notions, adding details and drama where before there were none (in an amusing twist, the Awful Grandmother plays the interrupting listener, questioning Lala's every interpretation and insisting that her granddaughter play up the love story). Through Cisneros's beautiful prose, the Awful Grandmother becomes vulnerable: "It was dizzying to decide one's fate, because, to tell the truth, she'd never made any decision regarding her own life, but rather had floated and whirled about like a dry leaf in a swirl of foamy water."

When the Reyeses move from Chicago to San Antonio in Lala's 14th year, her life only becomes more complicated. So much the better for the reader. Cisneros's footnotes, explaining Mexican cultural references and character background, alone are worth the read. Lala endures the usual miserable adolescence, and Cisneros captures her petulant voice right down to the apostrophes: "The two guys in suits think we've stolen something. I mean, how do you like that? 'Cause we're teenagers, 'cause we're brown, 'cause we're not rich enough, right?"

Cisneros has said she began CARAMELO as a short story, but it kept growing. The semi-autobiographical work offers a lesson in Mexican history as well as in how to tell "healthy lies" --- the ones that don't hurt anyone. The significance of the title surfaces many times over. It's the color of the rebozo left to Lala when her grandmother dies; the skin of the servant girl who gives Lala a later-in-life epiphany; the mixed heritage of a Mexican-American family that remembers "a country I am homesick for, that doesn't exist anymore, that never existed." This fictional work of nonfiction turns out to be mainly fiction after all. Lala tells too many healthy lies to make it otherwise.

It's impossible not to compare Cisneros's multigenerational tale to THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS or ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, but unlike Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cisneros's magic comes from actual realism. Each word is a brushstroke. Lala's story is one of construction, and truth, and consequence, but ultimately one of memory. As her grandfather is once told, "Remembering is the hand of god. I remember you, therefore I make you immortal." Just try not to remember Lala Reyes and her colorful family history. Cisneros has painted quite a picture.

--- Reviewed by Toni Fitzgerald

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece!, October 6, 2002

By 

Laura Duet (Downers Grove, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Caramelo (Hardcover)

Clearly, Sandra Cisneros is a genius! This is one of the best books I have ever read. The story is completely engaging and I really fell in love with the characters. The writing is out of this world, in a word it is exquisite. The story is a multi-generational tale of a family who is Mexican-American. I am attracted to books that tell a story of a culture I am unfamiliar with and then after reading such a book I am very interested in people of that culture. This is such a book. Along with that it is just a great, great read. Do not hesitate to get this book, and if you have a chance to see Sandra Cisneros at a reading do whatever you need to to get there, she is wonderful in person, funny, warm, and engaging. This book gets my highest recommendation! I am lucky to have read it.