Customer Reviews

La Maravilla

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4 star:		(1)
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i began to write this book in 1989 when i was defending a Mexican-American boy against a charge of murder. The judge and the jury in this small San Joaquin valley town were so incredibly racist and abusive toward my client and myself that I took my anger and frustration to my small computer. (The boy was convicted, but his sentence has since been reversed...specifically because of the the judge's abuse of his power.) A story of the true origins of culture; a story about race that began in anger slowly became a love song for culture, for people on the outside. ALFREDO VEA JR.

This book is honestly the best one I have encountered in a very, very long time. The manipulation of time, the unexpectedness of virtues in characters so many other authors would have made into cliches, the theme of physics as a unifying science, all make this a book about so much more than "Buckeye". It's about the world, the universe, life and death, ancient ways colliding with progress. If you want to change the way you see the world, read this book.

This novel carries with it ghosts and magic, love and forgiveness; it carries the embodiment of the human spirit. It is simply a work that has affected me deeply for several years--something I may pick occassionally to read aloud, to hear the lyric and respect with which this story has been told.

The pastiche of characters: Beto and his family, locals and drifters, find humanity within each others' alienation in a desolate yet profound environment.

If you have been moved by the history and beauty of Marquez or Allende, and other so-called Magic Realists, if the poetic style of Michael Ondaatje appeals to you, and if you are still haunted by the characters of Steinbeck's "The Wayward Bus" or "Cannery Row"--you must read this book. And if you have read this book, please consider reading a book by Canadian author Sky Lee called "Disappearing Moon Cafe." It is equally as gorgeous.

I haven't read a book that has touched me this much in years. I was awed by the music in Vea's words, breathless trying to understand the layers of meaning found in this book. It's like a beautiful dream, or a kaleidoscope from which you cannot and do not want to look away. You will enjoy this book if you are into Magical Realism, or simply if you like exploring the themes of family, death, and the supernatural. A gem of a book. I wonder if the book was originally writte in Spanish-- I suspect it would be even more beautiful that way.

Partially autobiographical, La Maravilla tells the engrossing tale of a young boy growing up in a migrant workers' "town" outside Phoenix, AZ, in the 1950s and 60s.

Speaking to some of the other reviewers' comments that the book is difficult to get into, I found that the "slow" beginning was actually the author building the base on which the wonders of the rest of the book so beautifully fit.

Rarely have I felt such a sense of wonderment and connection while reading a work of fiction. Vea's depictions of some of his characters can (and should) be labeled magical realism, but those touches make the characters even more real and allow the reader a deeper understanding of the world Vea has constructed.

Read this book. You won't regret it.

This is one of the most gorgeous books I have ever read. If I had to chose 10 books to be stranded on a desert island with, this would certainly be one of them. Thank you, thank you Mr. Vea for giving us this wonderful treasure of a novel.

La Maravilla organizes itself as a complex yet illuminating narration that revolves around experiential themes related to the voyage, the epiphany, and the spectacle, thus making altered forms of consciousness--like the dream, the vision, and the nightmare--a trope for reading the novel. The result will be a narrative amalgam that includes love stories, "visions" (particularly Beto's Yaqui rite of initiation), and folk healers, all displayed through a setting found on the "wasteland" of Phoenix, that is to say, on a city dump awaiting the cleansing fires and the new life-forms that shall rise from their own ashes. The multilayered structure of La Maravilla's narrative is found embryo-like in the title itself through its polycultural meanings, namely: a marvel (maravilla, in Spanish), a flower (the Aztec cempasúchil [marigold], as the flower of the dead), and a dog (a person's guide to Mictlan, the land of the dead according to pre-Columbian mythology). Obviously, in addition to these suggested meanings, there are interconnections made through punning between the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Captain Marvel, and with a collective response to female beauty: Josefina's when she marries Manuel ("a hundred different tongues to mouth their marvel at the beauty of the bride," p. 288). The title itself, as a result, becomes an ideological construct in its own right, composed of polyglot meanings--Aztec, Spanish, English--that revolve around a common metaphysical axis, namely: life and death. The word maravilla, in sum, sends reverberations across several languages, either through the conduit of cognates (e.g, maravilla=marvel), or by way of archetypes linked to cycles of nature that thematize ideas of decay and resurrection. The novel might be read, consequently, as an extended reflection on languages, beginning with the language of the dead (Josephina's commentary in the novel's prologue) passing judgment on the limitations inherent in (mortal) languages ("but human language is as limiting as human eyesight or human thought" [p. 2]). Moreover, one might read La Maravilla as Véa's resolve to uplift understanding through an expansion of situations that are polyglot either through cognates, archetypes, or multilingual translations, creating a long chain of semantic associations that move on the surface of a deep symbolic unconscious where the limits of understanding--easily associated with a Babel-like confusion of tongues--are once and for all resolved. Reason and the unconscious henceforth will be overturned, clearly not through a Freudian paradigm, for in La Maravilla one finds this opposition rewritten through the paradox of the "living dead"--i.e., the living memory of one's ancestors, an ancient metaphor for history and tradition--considered wiser than mortals. When asked by Teresa Márquez (in an unpublished interview) how he approaches the act of writing, Véa answers in the language of nude honesty and intoxication: he says he writes in his underwear and with a glass of cabernet at his reach. "I sit down and write what I feel like writing....And I keep doing that and something in the subconscious knows that it is going to fit together and it is only when the work takes shape that I become obsessively focused on certain parts of the work and in making the interstitial connections." If one recalls Véa's purpose in writing La Maravilla ("I wanted to write it in a way that an English reader could read it and understand what it felt like to have a childhood in Spanish"), the question regarding the intended audience becomes more complex than originally understood, for the novel illustrates the dynamics of a polyglot world--narrative, community, family, etc.--wherein languages, like carnival streamers, disperse in different directions. Since Spanish--as a term, not the language--represented what was considered a universal empire in spite of its diversity (ideally held together by a religious faith), the reader must fathom in Buckeye Road--by contiguity, Phoenix; symbolically, the Southwest--the various historical dreams and visions--the Seven Cities of Cíbola, El Dorado, the American Dream, etc.--that, like geological layers, mark the passing of time and the fall of empires. Véa's interest in history is expressed in a recent essay entitled "Caliban and Prospero No More," published in the East Los Angeles literary journal UNTITLED; in this essay, a synchronous connection is made between modern United States and the Spanish Empire through hierarchies of violence and the constant threats and acts of deportation. In his interview with Teresa Márquez, Véa affirms that "cultural sameness is entropy, the death of society....When you throw culture away you are left with what we call in America 'race'; when you throw culture away the only thing you have left is 'color'; I think it has made us a very mean-spirited place to live. People who have no roots don't belong anywhere." The source of inspiration for this "vision" that is both aesthetic and ethical is Véa's grandfather who appears in La Maravilla as a Yaqui mentoring figure who gives to his grandson a moral instruction that serves as a compass in the blood, i.e., as a connection to family ancestry and to his true homeland. Just before Beto's rite of initiation into Yaqui knowledge, he is told by his grandfather: "I will give you a sight of your own blood so that someday years from now you will not be made anxious by wrong questions and you will not look for answers in the wrong place. You don't need to see no psychiatrist, Beto. Never. Nunca. You just need to look into yourself and beyond, past yourself....Remember, you are not white, and if someday you find yourself asking a white man's questions, the answer will not be there for you" (pp. 217-218). Regarding writers considered influential in his own writing, Véa reveals his love for Herman Melville, Theodor Dostoievsky, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas (whose poem, "A Process in the Weather of the Heart" serves as La Maravilla's epigraph), William Butler Yeats, and the poetry and essays of Octavio Paz. Of Chicano writers he only remembers Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima; he adds Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodríguez. "I am really tired of Chicano writing being folk writing requiring no scholarship," Véa tells Márquez, adding that he wrote La Maravilla "as a response to Richard Rodríguez's book." When asked if his writing has been influenced by the late Carlos Castañeda, whom he considers a man with a lot of "imagination," he denies there being any influence whatsoever; the source comes from his own Yaqui ancestry and through the agency of his grandfather. In the area of Yaqui literature, Véa acknowledges the writing of Refugio Zavala, a Yaqui poet whose work combines the whisper of the lizard with the memory of the blood inside. The newspaper reviews on La Maravilla range from the "astonishing" to the "enchanting and powerful." Sam Harrison's opinion differs from most reviews; author of two novels himself, Harrison judges Véa's novel "sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating, always rich and extravagant." Along with Véa's "fascinating cultural information," Harrison finds the novel's "random jumping from present to past to future" all too demanding, for it is either "ultimately frustrating" or "preachy and out of context." More subtle and capacious is Carolyn See's reading, who considers La Maravilla "beautifully written; it's thematically vital for our times." Also of interest, particularly in regards to biographical information, is John Boudreau's newspaper article where he suggests the marvel--in the sense of "miracle"--that La Maravilla's publication becomes in light of Véa's past: "Teachers told him," Boudreau writes," he would never attend college because he came from the fields." In these reviews--mostly laudatory--Harrison's deploys in its language, albeit unconsciously, the novel's own impulses towards "punning" through the word extravagant, which moves through a surface of meanings ranging from the narrow sense of unnecessarily lavish to the more inclusive trajectory out of orbit, understood as unconventional (in manners), the alien in another's home (wandering away from a rightful place), and beyond the bounds of reason (madness). To be sure, La Maravilla is "extravagant" in its eroticization of language and as a narrative of "border" crossings, either in this world or to and from Mictlan. One could even add the "extravagance" of the work of art that wanders beyond the mainstream, a notion one finds expressed at the moment of Beto's initiation: "Can you think of one great jump of art or thought that was ever accomplished by the mainstream?"(p. 221) La Maravilla contributes to the enrichment of the Chicano novel with its historical

I'm not surprised that a few reviewers had trouble staying with "La Maravilla". It is a challenging work, both in content and form...a bit like critically acclaimed art house movies that are greeted with mixed reviews from the public. I can't deny that the writing is excellent, and the subject noble, but I also can't deny that I was bored through the entire midsection of this book.

The novel vividly depicts a squatters community outside Phoenix in the 1950s. Migrant workers return from work on flatbeds, lesbian prostitutes turn tricks in the back seats of cars, elderly grandparents have waking dreams and astral episodes amidst scenes of desert life... sounds fascinating, right? The setting is, but the story is surprisingly spare. Not a lot happens among these episodic moments, and much of what happens would better lend itself to visual form.

I never entirely connected with these characters, although I could appreciate what young Beno is losing when he is taken away to California at the novel's end. There is a rich history to this community, one that is lost in mainstream America.

This book has become one of my all-time favorites. I didn't want it to end because I loved all the characters so much (even the seedy ones). It reminded me of a story that I loved when I was younger, Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine", in the way the author created a vivid and compelling world. I will never forget Josephina and her "scorpion water" or Manual and his "caboose".
The way that the author wrapped up the story details at the end when the main character is an adult was skillful and pleasant to read.

Best book I've read in a long time. Really ties humanity together and the flow of place and time is exquisite!