Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories (Writing in Latinidad) [Hardcover]

Susana Chavez-Silverman (Author), Paul Allatson (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Writing in Latinidad | Publication Date: October 11, 2004

A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author’s inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional "crónica" make this memoir compelling and powerful. Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman.

Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine’s Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers new to California-born Chávez-Silverman's unapologetic and bold back-and-forth between English and Spanish may at first be unable to classify what they are reading. It's quick, charming and utterly confusing to those who don't speak some Spanish. But the author aims to wake readers up, make them think and develop a truly 21st-century notion of multiculturalism. Early on in this bittersweet, often sarcastic and meditative memoir, Chávez-Silverman tells readers, "Para explicar estos mis flights (of fancy), tendría que empezar por decir que soy, it is—my language—cual homing pigeon on acid." As Chávez-Silverman, who teaches Romance languages and literatures at Pomona College, takes readers across borders and through time, she throws together a bevy of words diverse and complex enough to represent her vast variety of life experiences, from facing the challenges of being a Latina woman to dealing with loneliness, going out dancing and exploring new cultures. This is a memoir of place, as Chávez-Silverman recounts feeling isolated and alone in Johannesburg, at home in Los Angeles and as if she is searching in Buenos Aires. In his foreword, Latino culture expert Paul Allatson rightly declares, "[T]he kinds of code-switching and linguistic inventions that characterize [this book] represent a new 'American' literary and linguistic form." This is not a memoir written outside the box; it is a memoir written to obliterate it.
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Review

“This is not a memoir written outside the box; it is a memoir written to obliterate it.”—Publishers Weekly

"Susana Chávez-Silverman isn't a code-switcher but a switch-burner. Her Killer Crónicas is an astonishing example of linguistic mestizaje. It's also a prophetic statement: north and south are no longer applicable coordinates to understand the Americas. They have merged into a single gravitational order where languages are in constant mutation."—Ilan Stavans, author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language

“A stirring memoir . . . practically a performance. Killer Crónicas is a testament to the maturing sense of global and pan-Latin citizenship being claimed by Chicanos and U.S.-born Latinos in the American West. Combine this with such innovation in language, and her book may one day be regarded as a refreshing turning point in Latino literature, maybe even the truly bilingual literary voice that the pioneering Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldúa called for.”—Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times

"Susana Chávez-Silverman's Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories is a masterfully written memoir in the form of 'chronicles' exploring issues of memory, family relationships, and language. Her philosophical excursions on writing, intertextuality, and life in general are brilliantly and humorously rendered in a bilingual format of  code-switching that evidences a superb knowledge of English and Spanish. This linguistic dexterity enables the crónicas to flow effortlessly from one language to another and easily captivates the reader as he/she  travels with the author in a most enjoyable and fascinating journey from  California to South Africa, Argentina, Spain, and Chile."— María Herrera-Sobek, associate vice chancellor and Luis Leal Endowed Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara

"These chronicles are truly hemispheric, postmodern memories written in a ludic, singular Spanglish that encapsulates the transnational, nomad vivencias of a Jewish Chicana from Califas, a citizen of the Hispanic world. Original, powerful and profound."—Frances Aparicio, University of Illinois at Chicago

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 174 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (October 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299202208
• ISBN-13: 978-0299202200
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,013,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Killer Cronicas, September 28, 2005

By 

Catherine Brown "catalinamaria" (near Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories (Writing in Latinidad) (Hardcover)

Clever, sassy, intelligent, poetic... continual code-switching is a wonderful vehicle to convey the sensations and experiences of a multi-cultural life. Her poetry invokes the intimacy I often feel when back in a long-lost land. Her quick wit and carefully-chosen details chronical well the feelings of isolation and observer-looking-in that seem to dog me wherever I land.
This is well worth the read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trips well-worth Taking in this Gorgeous Linguistic and Dramatic Tour-de-force!, January 7, 2007

By 

Elizabeth Rosa Horan (Tempe, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories (Writing in Latinidad) (Hardcover)

Killer Crónicas asks the following questions, among others:

* What is the nature of the exquisitely ambiguous pleasure we experience in passing as members of the local community?
* What are the costs of being identified as an insider, or outsider, by members of the communities in which we travel?
* How might the experience of being at once inside and outside be specific to pan-Latin and Jewish post-holocaust cultural identity, without regard to location?
* How to develop a language limited enough to connote specific geopolitical contexts, yet broad enough to denote the simultaneity in memory of related circumstances separated by distance and time?

Killer Crónicas draws from multiple genres, such as the literature of travel in Spanish (cartas de exploración, of discovery) and in English (here, the Anglo-American category of life-writing, which includes biography, autobiography, and letters, is helpful.) Particulary original is the sustained and studied attention to the traveler's status as a consumer. Underlying the internationalism and bilingualism of Chávez-Silverman's accomplishment is a creativity comparable to Latino performance artists such as Coco Fusco (author of English is Broken Here) Guillermo Gómez-Peña, or code-switching poets such as Tino Villanueva.

I personally find Gloria Anzaldua's work almost unreadable (there's no rhyme, reason, or inventiveness) while I think that Cherrie Moraga is good for her work's characters and dynamic. In Killer Crónicas what's original is how the writer focuses attention on the relation between what we say and how we say it in one or both languages, showing how the mind moves at the moment of the "switch." This work demonstrates a mode of thought familiar to those of us who work in multiple cultural locations, reproducing the habit of thinking in multiple languages. This challenges the hegemonic attitudes about what constitutes linguistic propriety in either Spanish or English by pointing up the complexities of both languages. Also the mixture of languages legitimates a practice that is very widespread: the INVENTIVE use of multiple languages, registers. Read this very contemporary, brilliant book for the puns, for the writer's inspired, faux, alternative, and refused translations. Killer Crónicas is steeped in multiple literary traditions: Argentine, CalifAtzlan, On the Road-Trippers, but most of that incomparable Spanish-language genre that is so definitive in the New World: the Crónica. Let Susana Chavez-Silverman be your guide and you will travel far, far indeed.

5.0 out of 5 stars billingual brilliance!, February 26, 2010

By 

Julia Goldstein - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories (Writing in Latinidad) (Hardcover)

A fantastic, funny, smart collection of memoirs. You have probably never read anything like it.