From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This collection of 18 short stories spanning the past 30 years showcases Anaya's literary voice, at once innocent and omniscient, and rooted in the windswept
llanos (plains) of New Mexico. Anaya, the award-winning Chicano author (
Bless Me, Ultima), masterfully infuses his
cuentos, or folktales, with mysticism and spirituality. The title story, for example, encapsulates a rancher's hard-learned lesson about magic. Anaya fluently weaves sensuality with small-town Catholicism in "Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams," about a teenage bride consumed by sexual fantasies. When the face of Christ supposedly appears on the church wall at sunset, she and her shy new husband connect over their inability to see the miracle. In "The Silence of the Llano," the collection's most moving story, the marital bliss of the
ranchero Rafael is destroyed when his wife dies in childbirth, and he and his new daughter live separate, isolated lives under the same roof for 16 years, until another tragedy reunites them. "In Search of Epifano" features death as a benign figure, representing not only inevitability but also the resolution of a deep-seated desire unquenchable by anything on earth. Anaya's characters' longing shimmers off elegiac, deceptively simple prose, captivating in its aspiration and achievement.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Best known for novels like
Bless Me, Ultima (1994), New Mexico's native son now presents a collection of short stories spanning 30 years. Considered the founder of Chicano literature, Anaya incorporates Southwestern landscapes into the interiorscapes of his characters. From the brutality of the desert to the silence of barren plains, heartbreak, near madness, and desperation manifest in relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, loners and members of society's various "tribes." Many stories are mythical, containing elements of faith and magic intertwined with Catholic ritual and Mexican culture. In the preface, Anaya says he wrote these stories when he was called to do so, even during work on a major novel. He is a man not so much haunted as graciously receptive to visitations of the best kind: symbols, images, and threads of story found in the fabric of his imagination, the tapestry of his personal history and culture. Readers will be hard-pressed to resist Anaya's work because of the revelation and redemption it consistently offers.
Janet St. JohnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
