Customer Reviews

Cellophane

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
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As a boy in Trujillo, Peru, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua receives his fortune from a monkey in the plaza. "Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer," the scrap of paper warns. "Pay them no mind. They would have you doubt your goals." The paper further advises Victor to pray to the Virgin of Copacabana for protection against the day when he will face unexpected disaster. Victor eventually builds a paper factory in the rain forest of eastern Peru, finds the statue of the Virgin of Copacabana, and brings it to his jungle home, Floralinda. All is well with his world--until 1952, when he discovers, amid dark portents, how to make cellophane--thereby precipitating the dire events predicted in the second half of his childhood fortune.

The action which follows is divided into three "plagues." A "plague of truth" follows the discovery of cellophane, as each character in Floralinda, including the priest, confesses his/her romantic indiscretions. A "plague of hearts" follows, with each person pursuing new love or rekindling old love. Ultimately, a "plague of revolution" occurs, as government soldiers invade Floralinda, and local workers blame Don Victor and his cellophane for these troubles and the bloody battles which result.

Rich and atmospheric, Cellophane is a consummately "Latin American" novel in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though there is less "magical realism" here. Examining the lives, past and present, of Don Victor, his wife, their children, spouses, lovers, and servants, Arana creates vibrant portraits showing the contrasts between those who leave the city for life in the jungle, and those who have lived there all their lives. The Catholicism of "civilized" city life contrasts with the vibrant spirit world of the native inhabitants, and the tension between reality and spirit infuses the action.

Considered a "shape-changer," Don Victor practices the local religion, regularly visits a curandero (healer), ingests hallucinogens for purification, and has a "spirit creature"-- the huge Andean condor. Other characters, some of them devout Catholics, show "the interconnectedness of all things" by accepting treatment from the curandero, treasuring magical talismans, believing prophetic dreams, and, deep in the jungle, making unexpected discoveries about themselves, the spirit world, and the unity of life.

Expansive in scope and theme but magnificently controlled in execution, Cellophane is thoroughly entertaining, filled with humor and irony. Within her warm humor, Arana examines themes of creativity and spirit, love and responsibility, society vs. solitude, liberty vs. autocracy, and the conflict between new and old ways. Swirling from present to past and back, as background and action combine, Arana develops engaging characters and the fully drawn community of Floralinda, creating a novel lovers of literary fiction will celebrate. n Mary Whipple

My opinion on this book changed several times through the reading. Arana certainly writes very clean prose, but there were times I would have traded a bit of that for a bit more spark. And, at times, the "magic" seemed closer to overwrought coincidence. In the end, however, she pulled it off.

I was drawn in by the idea of the protagonist (Don Victor) wanting to make paper (and, eventually, cellophane) in the Amazon. Few are the books that honor an engineer wanting to create, especially in difficult circumstances in a less developed country. Placing this in the Amazon allowed the tensions between European and Indian, Christian and Animist, and even tribe and tribe, to color the story. Ultimately, it is a struggle between Europeans over wealth that causes all the other tension to flare up and wreak havoc.

It seems unlikely that the plot's dependence on the difficulty of imposing western concepts of civilization on other people, even when it brings them material advantage, is unrelated to events in the world today. But this is not a book about the world today, and it can be read for pleasure as a period piece, even if the author doesn't always succeed in separating period and modern sensibilities. (If paper doesn't grab you, rest assured that there are bad marriages, affairs, lusts, feuds, and grudges to keep you occupied.)

While certainly not a towering work of modern literature, it is well above average for a modern American novel. And it is very much approachable for those wanting a taste of Latin American magical realism who have been scared off by the "better bring a machete to cut through the prose" secondary but over-hyped works in the genre.

A lot of being said lately about the brilliance of Latin American fiction. But, for me, the pages and pages of flowery prose just get to be too much after awhile. This book was better than I expected. At first, I didn't know if I would be able to make it through. I didn't know if the story of a man's obsession with making paper in the jungle would be enough. It is actually the journey of the family that is the story. Surprisingly, by the time I finished the book I found myself enjoying it. The characters are well developed and understandable in their thoughts and actions. Not everyone wil enjoy this style of writing, but it is certainly worth a read. If you enjoy Latin American literature, you will like this book. If you have been wanting to sample it, this would be a good start.

Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, who founded the paper/cellophane factory in the Peruvian rainforest, struggles to understand connections. He thinks the stars above are made of the same substance that humans are, that what we do down here is tied to what floats up there. "I mean, things do connect, don't they? I was thinking about this as I walked over here. Men's bones feed the dirt. The dirt feeds the seeds. The seeds grow to plants. The plants make the paper."

Throughout this wildly chaotic book, countless characters prove the connections that exist between their dreams, visions, memories and actions. For example, the appetite of truth. Victor's wife, Dona Mariana, confesses the gospel truth about her heritage; their three grown children reveal the naked truth about their erotic lives; the priest, the cook, the teacher all have secret tales of shocking candor.

This unvarnished, comical truth telling leads to a new appetite of desire, overwhelming wants of physical debauchery. Characters are seduced, led astrayed, entrapped as the overendulged carouse through the hacienda (Floralinda) that Don Victor built and through the natural wilderness that surrounds their lives. They desire love, love, love. Some find it.

As the appetite for revolution permeates the small community, Don Victor realizes that the bad is connected to the good. When the evil eye power is so strong sometimes he can only stand back and let it pass. "You and I are only small creatures in a large universe," says Yorumbo, the curandero.

When the Indians struggle for control of their own land from the Sobrevilla family and the military, readers watch the freedom process throughout all the connections with breathless wonder.

(I ordered this book from Amazon because of the July 6, 2006, New York Times review, and because I plan to visit Peru for the first time in 2007.)

I loved the author's debut, "American Chica," and had high hopes for "Cellophane." I've been trying to finish it since June and simply cannot. I came to these reviews and learned (thanks, ALCStuart) that this book would become more rewarding after page 129. It did pick up a bit but even so, my frustration at the lack of flow to "Cellophane" -- I'm not sure the big cast of characters are distinct enough to keep track off -- finally doomed my effort to reach the conclusion.

If you have ever read a book where every sentence -- standing alone -- shines with beauty, but the whole book simply doesn't work, well -- that is what we have here.

"Cellophane" is comparable to "The Mosquito Coast" in that an idiosyncratic inventor retreats to the jungle to create a modern product far from civilization. And (obviously) in its magical realism, "Cellophane" resembles the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book is well-titled and could have been a fine tale on the risks of too much honesty -- IF the author had asked herself of each sentence, "How does this advance my story," and done the necessary excising of wandering material.

Let's hope this is a sophomore slump. There is so much promise in Arana's books, better realized in her debut, and clearly seen by other more favorable reviewers here, that I honestly look forward to book 3 despite the slog of book 2.

Following in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, Peruvian-American Arana shapes her debut novel with magic realism and ebullient, rambunctious prose.

Don Victor Sobrevilla, an engineer from Trujillo, pursues his dream of building a paper factory in the Amazon jungle, where his family thrives far from the modern bustle of the coast. As the story opens, his three children are grown, with children of their own, and the generations live together in the big hacienda, the center of village life.

One daughter, Belén, for whom books are as essential as breathing, has married her father's factory foreman. Graciela, a sensitive beauty, is alone, separated from her brute of a husband. Jaime, the only son, has married "a parched bird of a woman, as arid as the dunes of Chan Chan," a woman "with a pedigree that proved totally useless in the jungle."

The book teems with pedigrees - the family connections of characters going back generations, with reverberations that affect the lives of their progenies' progenies' progeny. Victor's desire to carve out a new life in the jungle, to build a town around him there, stems partly from the haughty Sobrevillas' shock at a rupture in their line.

When Victor's youngest sister was born, the taint became clear - Chinese blood! In their Spanish blueblood hearts there's nothing lower than the blood of coolies, slaves, people dragged to Peru on false promises and worked to death en masse, an example of that peculiar human universality that despises and demeans wronged and brutalized peoples.

But in the jungle Victor's family bumps along fine together until the day Victor perfects cellophane - that clear wrap already common in cities but unknown in the jungle. Transparency suddenly envelops the family and all those who come in contact with it. Years of lies and long-held secrets are suddenly exposed. Chaos, at first humorous, then corrupt, runs rampant.

Beautifully written, with the rich, boisterous imagery of the best South American writers, "Cellophane" will appeal to fans of magic realism. For me, however, the style has run its course and the plethora of interconnected characters becomes tiresome to untangle. Reading Arana's earlier memoir, however, further illuminates the story's themes of the dangers of truth and lies and the inescapable yoke of family.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Throughout the ages, telling the truth has always been held in high esteem. From the opening books of the Bible which give us the Commandment against bearing false witness, to elementary school history books that extol the virtue of honesty by repeatedly emphasizing that George Washington never told a lie, we have been continually led to believe that the truth shall set us free.

But can always being truthful be too much of a good thing? This philosophical question is put to the test with amazing consequences when a plague of truth strikes a Peruvian family in Marie Arana's first novel, "Cellophane."

Set in the dense rainforest of South America's third largest country, Arana uses Peru's allure as a mystical, magical, inaccessible region where only the most adventurous dare to traverse, as the home base of a patriarchal family led by Don Victor Sobrevilla, an eccentric engineer whose quest for concocting the perfect recipe for cellophane puts into motion a string of events that exposes secrets long kept hidden behind closed lips.

"Not since (Don Victor) set foot on the riverbank and christened the land Floralinda had he sensed that he was on the verge of something significant, that he was--as the witchman who birthed his daughters had told him--being summoned into the universe. Beware of wanting too much, the witchman had quickly added, for greed always ends in privation."

As Don Victor prepares to enjoy the realization of his dream, life for his family members and close associates becomes convoluted in a vortex of shameful family histories, past and current erotic transgressions, and the destabilization of the only form of community government in the region, making everyone's life as flimsy and transparent as the pieces of cellophane that litter their hacienda's terrain.

Skillfully weaving modern science, folk medicine and religious faith, Arana captures the nuances of life on the Ucayali riverbank, which due to its location in the Amazon rainforest, makes it a part of the world that time and technology often overlook. It's the perfect setting for a tale that begins with the family dog barking strangely and a wild little boy who turns blue and dies with a heart as black as stone, to literal affairs of the priesthood, and culminating with loves and lust best kept secret but in the end cannot be contained by man.

Arana, editor of The Washington Post Book World, sympathetically demonstrates her knowledge the of region, an area she knows well as she was born in Peru of a Peruvian father and an American mother, and lived in the country for the first 10 years of her life. Her native language--Spanish--comes in handy as Spanish words and phrases, along with cultural beliefs and reverence to familial hierarchies and religious observances and obligations, set a firm foundation for the book's protagonist to return to or ignore, depending upon circumstance.

Does the truth truly set one free? While "Cellophane" is an original and spirited work of fiction, readers are going to find it hard not to question this central issue of virtue in their own lives, and contemplate whether the secrets they hold in their hearts and tongues are best left alone.

Last week while reading "Cellophane," I listened to an audiotape of Ms. Arana's talk at the recent Book Expo America because I wanted to know more about her novel and the world from which it stems. I must say that I was taken aback not only by the author's insistence that Latin America is "sheer magic," but by Ms. Arana's generalizations about Latin American families ("haughty" men who are really quixotic; feminine women who have the "grip as dangerous as an anaconda"). But what really didn't sit right with me is the author's statement about Latin American children. According to her, in a Latin American family children "no matter how poor, live lives of privilege and station." Try telling this to the hundreds of thousands of abused, abandoned children in Brazil, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Perú, and other countries in Latin America! An idea like this is 'puro celofán.'

Ms. Arana has all the right to weave her mythologies into fiction--that's what fictions are for--but to insist that these are sociological facts or the observations of a Carlos Fuentes in the making is sheer...audacity. For novelistic recreations of Peruvian worlds, I recommend Vargas Llosa, Bryce Echenique, Arguedas, Gutiérrez, Ribeyro, Cueto, Riesco, Elmore, Roncagliolo, even Bayly.

Like many of the other reviewers I found a great deal to love about this novel but was left a little disappointed. I am a big fan of novels of this type - family saga, magical realism, a South American setting - and I thought that for the most part, Ms. Arana did a wonderful job bringing these characters and this story to life. Her language is evocative and lush and some of the ideas she was trying to explore were really thought-provoking. My biggest problem was that I don't think she was able to clearly and fully realize whatever it was she was trying to ultimately say or achieve with this story. The issues of truth, love, desire, belief etc all get jumbled together and it is unclear by the end what the experience of Victor Sobrevilla and his family is supposed to show us. I also felt like there was an attempt to explore Peru's political and social history but again, in the end, I wasn't clear about what Ms. Arana wanted to say. That aspect of it is only hinted at throughout the novel and at the end seems to be of vital importance. The problem is, the reader doesn't have enough background to draw any conclusions from it.

Despite these flaws, I think the book is certainly worth reading and I look forward to reading more of Ms. Arana's work. She truly is a gifted writer and - at least when it comes to fiction - perhaps just needs a little more time to develop her talent.

It is a rare first novel that can or should be mentioned in the same breath as those of the South American master Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but "Cellophane" is such a one. Its Peruvian American author, Marie Arana , deftly transports us to an enchanted world deep in the Peruvian rainforest that fleetingly calls to mind Marquez' Macondo, but moves on to weave its own special magic.

"Cellophane" is the story of Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, an engineer and dreamer who moves his young family from a comfortable existence in the coastal city of Trujillo to satisfy his passion---to build a paper factory deep in the jungle and be master of his own fate and all who live and work around him.

There on the Ucayali River he builds his own small kingdom: A grand hacienda, Floralinda, huts for worker families, and his factory. Then, in a trance induced by an Indian curandero-shaman, he conjures a radical new product, cellophane. He is seized by a passion to build a cellophane empire---and he and all around him are subsequently seized by more passion---a plague of truth-telling that leads to hilarious, shocking and, in the end, violent results.

Along the way, Arana , in a very quick 367 pages, treats Indian sorcery, racism, classism, Latin America's fondness for caudillos and more. And she creates a series of unforgettable characters, particularly her women, any one of whom could be another magical novel.

Arana is book editor at the Washington Post and a veteran of the publishing world. In 2002, her "American Chica" memoir tracing her family life in Peru and North America was a National Book Award finalist. Last year, she edited a book on "The Writing Life," in which she profiled and interviewed a series of contemporary writers on their sources and techniques.

Clearly, she has paid her dues, and she draws eloquently, effectively and imaginatively both from her childhood in Peru and her time at the editor's desk. The result is an assured and masterful debut novel in which she juggles a colorful cast of characters and several plot lines with seamless skill..

Those who have read her memoir will see some family members and childhood experiences revisited and reflected in her novel, and it is fascinating and instructive to see how she has made compelling fiction from her life.

Those who have not read them both: Lucky you, you have great discoveries waiting.