Peel My Love Like an Onion [Hardcover]

Ana Castillo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 1999

Peel My Love Like an Onion is the breakthrough novel from Ana Castillo, author of the wildly praised So Far from God--a lyrical, steamy, and moving story of a love triangle set in the colorful world of flamenco dancing.

Carmen "La Coja" ("the cripple") Santos is a flamenco dancer of local renown in Chicago, despite the obstacle of a handicapped leg, the legacy of a childhood attack of polio. From the beginning of her professional career, she has carried on an affair with Agustín, the married director of her troupe--a romance that is going stale from overfamiliar lust and an absence of honesty.

But when she begins a passionate liaison with the younger Manolo, Agustín's godson and a dancer of natural genius, an angry rivalry is sparked. Add to that the looming reassertion of her crippling disease and Carmen's vexed relations with her mother, one of the most exasperating parents in recent literature, and you have all the ingredients for a love story à la Ana Castillo--equal parts soap opera, tragicomedy, and rhapsody. Laced with sarcastic asides and dead-on observations, Peel My Love Like an Onion is a universal work imbued with love's power to vex and exalt.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ana Castillo's voice is one of self-confident, hypnotic melancholy. Peel My Love Like an Onion, her fifth book, often reads like a diary rather than a novel--full of dashed-off midnight eloquence but unformed. It's the story of Carmen Santos, a flamenco dancer whose right leg is shriveled from polio. Her family moved from Mexico to Chicago before she was born: "My first language was Spanish but I am not really Mexican. I guess I am Chicago-Mexican." Castillo sees the immigrant experience as a minefield of ironies. Carmen works at the Domino's in the airport as a way of being a productive American, thus gaining her father's respect. One morning on a "power walk" she realizes that the shoes she is wearing may have been made in a sweatshop by some distant relative from "somewhere... very foreign, like seaweed-and-black-fungus-in-French-Vietnamese-soup foreign."

As the book moves back and forth between Carmen's dreams of economic and emotional freedom and her erotic life (in which passion often feels as much like a trap as a release), Castillo's fluid style often lapses into carelessness. And there is a blurred quality to many of the images, like photographs taken from a moving car. Carmen's story is most engaging when she experiences isolated moments of independence: flamenco dancing, for instance, for the customers at a hair salon where she is working, dragging her bad leg around in front of the ladies under the hair dryers. The scene--a moment to relish--is almost heroic in its defiance of the exhausted world. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

Confirming her reputation as a talented writer, Castillo's (So Far from God) sardonic and seductive novel flowers at the exotic intersection of Chicago's flamenco, Gypsy and Chicano communities, where Carmen Santos, a defiant ex-flamenco dancer, struggles with the end of her career and the dissolution of a passionate love triangle. Left with a crippled leg after a childhood bout of polio, Carmen has always been defined by those around herAher parents, the school for the disabled she attended, her lovers and her public, who know her as "La Coja" (the cripple). It is only when she is dancing that she is sure of her identity, and as polio belatedly reasserts itself in her 40-year-old body, she feels she is losing the core of her existence. Then, like her legs, her two Gypsy loversAAgust!n, the married leader of her troupe, and Manolo, a fiery young dancer and Agust!n's godsonAabandon her. After 17 years as a dancer and a sensual being, Carmen is reduced to working in a sweatshop, at an airport pizza joint and as a corn-on-the-cob peddler. Most difficult of all, she is forced to move back into the family home, where her crotchety mother erodes her spirit. Dependent, stubborn, naive and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Carmen is a realistically flawed and lively survivor. In the person of her indomitable protagonist, Castillo's trademark feminist and border-crossing concerns acquire a new depth and complexity. Her writing has matured, and she keeps her own voice unobtrusive, stitching a seamless narrative. The pace here does not match the breakneck velocity of her previous works, nor does the novel strain for elaborate effects or call upon magic realism, yet its verve is unflinching. As careful an achievement as the patient peeling of an onion, this compulsively readable narrative should delight, and expand, Castillo's audience. Agent, Susan Bergholz. Author tour. (Sept.) FYI: Castillo's first and second novels, The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogonia, will be reissued in trade paperback by Anchor.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (September 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385496761
• ISBN-13: 978-0385496766
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,161,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Carmen de las Alas, April 3, 2001

By 

Kay Mitchell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peel My Love Like an Onion (Hardcover)

Carmen la Coja soars through her life like a bird with giant wings, refusing to relent in the face of incredible obstacles, and still manages to be brilliant and sexy and desired. In the Flamenco world, Carmen is a symbol of grace and beauty, of amazing passes and fluid movements, and as a part of this world, even though she is not "gitana" she delves into that world as if she is a native. A polio-crippled Mexican-American from Chicago, Carmen faces life with spunk and a fearless sense of fate that carries her through passionate love affairs with two dazzling Gypsy dancers whose own bond of filial honor results in her desertion and eventual reclamation, albeit after is is too late. That Carmen triumphs at last in the Flamenco world is a tribute to her luck as well as to her devotion and faithfulness to her old friends and family. That she struggles on despite physical debilities that would stymy many others brings her the success that she has long deserved, as well as the fulfillment of her dreams and longings for security and love. This is an exciting novel, full of love and lust, magic and mystique. A must read!!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crippled within, December 26, 2002

By 

Dalia Azmy (Cairo, Egypt) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel (Paperback)

What a lovely piece of writing by Castillo. As I started reading 'Peel my love'I couldn't leave before finishing it. The novel fluctuates between different feelings: pity for Carmen (the crippled heroine), sympathy, admiration. Castillo seems to emphasize that if one feels crippled it is one's soul that is crippled that keeps one motionless. It is not physical cripplness that only detains one's decisions. Cripplness within is much more dangerous. One's inertia might be caused by customs and traditions that obstruct one's capabilities.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peeled onion: more than just a root vegetable, November 14, 2000

By 

"gitanagabriella" (Lemon Grove, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel (Paperback)

From beginning to end, Carmen "La Coja" (the cripple) is a woman who is as loveable and insecure as your best friend. The author's skillful dialog is some of the best I've ever read. The wry humor and tongue-in-cheek observations made me laugh out loud. Carmen's mother who shouts on the phone when she talks long distance reminded me of my own mom. Carmen's mother has lived a hard working life, and now in her later years, God help the person who comes between her and her afternoon novelas.

Carmen fully plunges her passionate spirit into her lovers and into her dance. Polio and lack of education color her life, as does her beauty. The book plays the extremes: ecstacy and despair, devotion and revenge, health and illness, discipline and abandonment, Gypsy, Mexicana and Gringa.

The novel is deliciously laced with Gypsy music and folklore, Mexican family life, love, cooking, lovers, and of course dance. Like Hemmingway in "The Old Man and the Sea," the author uses a light, simple touch, natural dialog, and understated, narrative. It's a book to bring to bed... unless of course your lover is waiting.