Customer Reviews

Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not since Tobias Wolffe's This Boy's Life have I been so moved by a work of nonfiction. Ms. Morano's economical prose, keenly observed detail and emotional honesty are a triple-threat. The essays work that magic of translating what your imagination conjures into an experience which you feel is now a genuine memory, something about which you and she have secret and sacred understanding. Everyone who has had their heart broken by their crazy boyfriend while travelling through Spain should read this book, and then everyone else should too, because after a glass of madeira or a cup of cafe con leche your mind might trick you into reminiscing about that year in Spain when your crazy boyfriend ...

In Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a treat to the senses. She invites us to explore her thoughts and feelings as she experiences daily life in Spain in the early 1990's, while teaching English at the University of Oviedo for a year. While in Oviedo, she enrolled in a Spanish language course for foreigners or "extranjeros."

In thirteen personal essays, Morano captures the reader's heart with her descriptive and poetic style. Her themes evoke a feeling of familiarity, for her stories are organized around topics such as food, travel, and solitude versus loneliness. "I'm hungry in both body and spirit," she writes. "I crave not just a meal, not just the take-out supper I can carry to the emptiness of my room, but a complete dining experience." One pressing issue during the year in Spain was her longing for the man she left behind in New York.

Morano prefaces her book by explaining that grammar is not simply words strung together to form sentences, but the mannerisms, gestures, and ways of life that accompany language. The book is organized into three parts. The essays in Part One reveal her struggle to learn the Spanish language while living the culture. The essays in Part Two revolve around her later trips to Spain. Part Three reflects her attitude toward travel along highways and how it shapes the individual. Morano's sentiments about travel and saying farewell to relationships are reflected in these lines:

"If you move about in the world, if you live fully and fall in love--with friends, acquaintances, and places and periods of time, your heart is going to break again and again. Each time you say good-bye, you'll feel the ache of impermanence, of inevitability, of your own finite days."

I connected with this book because I would have benefitted greatly from studying in foreign lands while I was studying Spanish as my college major. However, overseas travel and study programs were not as prevalent in the late 70's or early 80's as they are now. I have since made many excursions to Mexico and Spain, although at this point in my life I live vicariously as an eager armchair traveler. I comfortably travel to many faraway places through others' spoken and written accounts.

As I read Grammar Lessons, Morano took me on a vivid tour of her daily discoveries of cultural life and relationships in Spain. The pages held me spellbound, and I wished the journey did not have to end.

by Sharon Blumberg
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women

I loved every essay in this book. Beautifully written. Insightful. Entertaining. Thought provoking. Brilliant but never pretentious.

The book was delivered before the estimated delivery date. The book was in the stated condition- good.

This book is definitely for "young readers": the unsophisticated and unworldly ones specifically. Anyone who has been on a junior year abroad could have written it. Interest of content? OK for someone who has never left Mudville, USA. Syle? Adolescent. Subjects? Kids hanging around in bars (with other foreign kids) thinking thy are in love with each other, or with the fact that they are abroad, or crying over spilt milk. OR, waiting in line at the post office to buy a few stamps. My advice? If you're over twenty, don't waste your money or your eyesight.

The references to the Castillian language are equally inane. Way below Spanish 101.