This War Called Love [Paperback]

Alejandro Murguia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002

From Mexico City to San Francisco's Mission District, nothing comes easy—in life or in love. Here is an unstereotypical view of a world as treacherous as it is tender, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Authentic and honest, these nine stories focus on today’s Latino men, their strength and vulnerability, their fears and deepest desires.

Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award,1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This War Called Love is the second collection of stories by American Book Award-winner Alejandro Murguia (Southern Front). Young Reymundo's idyllic life in 1950s Mexico City is interrupted by one tragedy after another in the richly detailed "Boy on a Wooden Horse." Although the eight subsequent stories don't quite measure up to this one, there are a few gems. In "Ofrendas," Reymundo is older, living in San Francisco's Mission District, mourning a lost friend on the Day of the Dead. The darkly humorous "Barrio Lotto," in which a bus driver and his psychic wife struggle to stay afloat financially, features an ending worthy of Roald Dahl.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Equal parts funny and sad, Murguia's short stories depict, with tender and sometimes unflinching detail, love, life, and growing up Hispanic. The heartbreaking "Boy on a Wooden Horse" takes place in the year before an earthquake nearly leveled Mexico City and follows a young boy whose childhood races past him as he faces one tragedy after another. In the brief but powerful story "The Flower Seller," a child walks the streets of California, selling roses out of a bucket in restaurants while his mother repairs clothes and his sisters sew beads on dresses for retail stores--all of them working for pennies. Although the best of the collection are on the darker side, Murguia also shines in the more lighthearted stories; for instance, the hilarious dance maestro of "A Lesson in Meringue" teaches a class the forbidden dance, claiming it washes away problems and is the cheapest workout in town. Free of stereotypes and always honest, this collection presents Latino-Chicano life at full throttle. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872863948
• ISBN-13: 978-0872863941
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,063,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This War Called Love, December 15, 2002

By 

Jessica Santos (Cali) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This War Called Love (Paperback)

Mr. Murguia is an excellent writter as well as an excellent teacher. He brings us into the story by sending vivid pictures into our mind and letting us experience exactly what the charater is feeling. I feel that my family could relate to it as well. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Instructs and Delights, December 15, 2002

By 

Sara Greenwald "sarapeyton" (San Francisco, CAUSA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This War Called Love (Paperback)

Thsee stories show us a part of the real world, rather than isolated characters on a literary stage. Murguia's narrators are story-tellers, and their voices are wildly varied, but each so dead-on that reading is hearing them talk. Reading is easy despite Murguia's elaborate blending of ideas, feelings, and information. In "El Ultimo Round," for example a pair of movement cognoscenti hash out their politics drunk as skunks on the freeway.
You could use the book to learn a little Mexican Spanish or history or get a modern male view about love. Some of the stories are set-pieces. A very short one about a little boy selling roses reminded me of the moment in A Streetcar Named Desire when the heroine opens the door and sees an old woman calling "flores para los muertos -- flowers for the dead." She slams the door, realizing she can't just walk out on her dysfunctional family; there's just one escape from her dysfunctional self.
Moments like that risk becoming sops to a reader's conscience (we all face death, so what's a little oppression here and there...). Murguia dodges this risk by rooting his characters firmly in the real world. In the first story, a boy's dreamy cinematic image of his actress mother broods over the earthquake-transfigured city, but we and he spend most of our time with the facts of boyhood friendships, fights and betrayals, the vanished neighborhoods, and the history of Mexican cinema.
Murguia can celebrate the poor without romanticizing. In Ofrendas, the Day of the Dead in the Mission district comes through in its full seasoned exuberance. In A Lesson in Merengue, the dance instructor lets us know merengue can be fun, but can also mean getting grabbed by some random guy and going through the steps as fast as you possibly can until your feet and back are killing you. In Lucky Alley when a man rips off the woman he genuinely loves, even he knows she ought to leave, but we still wish she would come back. This one has the most skillful ending for a love story I've read in a long time.
Most of the writing is plain and direct, but word games and ironies lie just under the surface. A Toda Maquina has a guy fall against all odds in love, while heading with a stash in the back of his truck toward what he calls El Ley, which is LA, not a little desert town named Law.
There's a fair amount of Spanish, unitalicized, but most of the Spanish words are cognates or well known, or Murguia tips off the reader, unless they're curses. Toning down English dialog is something every writer does (just count the f's dropped in a typical coffee shop chat versus a typical novel these days). Here the Spanish gets away with more, which can create an impression that Spanish is the natural language of the unmentionable, one of the many subtle risks facing work like Murguia's, that can only be overcome by more books like his.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag, January 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: This War Called Love (Paperback)

Some excellent stories, but some that bore. Murguia has the sense of place and delivery of a culture down pat, but needs more skill in weaving a tale. I wanted to like this book more than I did, having read some of his other work, but overall it was pretty forgettable quickly after reading.