Customer Reviews

The Ultraviolet Sky

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I found myself drawn to Rosa's conflicting emotions in this tangled web of feelings and relationships. At age 34, teacher and painter Rosa seems to be undergoing an identity crisis: who is she to herself, who is she when she's alone? Never really having been alone before, she buys a house and tries it out. Finding herself pregnant with her 2nd husband's baby, she determines to bear and raise it alone. In spite of her flaws and weaknesses (which only make her a more compelling protagonist), Rosa continues to bravely ask questions, knowing there might be no answers forthcoming, about the roles and values she is expected to live by.
Provocative.

Picture a cave and, on the walls of the cave, paint, seeping through to the other side, a future unseen by most. Reading The Ultraviolet Sky is like taking a walk through such a cave, and the story that bleeds through to the other side is one of survival.Rosa, a painter, has determined that although she loves her husband Julio, she will not sacrifice herself to a destructive relationship with him. She cannot tolerate his jealousy. amd she will not allow the psychological wounds he inflicts on her to kill her spirit. She is a woman with a lot of spirit, and she knows that if that spirit is denied, she will kill the one who stifles it. Rather than kill Julio, she leaves him. A Chicana, Rosa struggles against the limits of social roles while she draws strength from the myths of her culture. Rosa also draws from the power of her own dreams nad sometimes from the stories of her grandmother to regain her hold on herself. As she pulls away from Julio and literally moves from the city to the mountains, she creates a space for herself, where all of her can live. This includes her painting, her intense sensuality, and her longing for a deep and secure sexuality. In refusing to give up her freedom, Rosa also loses her close friend Sierra who seems unwilling to understand the depths of Rosa's needs. Perhaps Sierra is afraid to recognize her own needs. Impatient with her friend's reluctance, Rosa is saddened by the knowledge that she will be more alone than she had anticipated in her journey. Like Lily Briscoe, Rosa struggles for her vision, but unlike Virginia Woolf's painter in To the Lighthouse, Rosa has her vision and her child. Villanueva offers the reader the opportunity to see how a woman can be both mother and artist, neither losing herself nor her life. This contemporary novel, by one of the best Latinas writing today, offers a thrilling response to Woolf's Briscoe and Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier as it gives its readers in times that beg for new ways of seeing a vision we can use to move forward in our own lives.

To her first novel,Alma Luz Villanueva brings the poet's divination for image and inernal logic, expressed in a series of dream sequences that hauntingly conclude each section and alter the hard forms of reality like a watercolor wash applied last. It's a fitting metaphor for her painter protagonist, Rosa, who embodies the modern feminist Chicana woman's struggle for self-definition in the male-centered Mexican culture as well as in the larger patriarchal culture....Rosa must reject the terms of possession (surrender and exploitation) in order to sustain her hopes for the futue she gives her children to. The protagonist has in her mind a painting she cannot finish, a composition of balance and infinite harmonies. Villanueva's ultraviolet sky is overhead for all of us.

This novel won the American Book Award, 1989- was chosen for New American Writing, 1990- and is used as a textbook in this country and abroad.

I chose this book for my bookclub selection because the author had recently spoken nearby and the newpapers description of her work sounded very interesting. As a group we found the book easy to read, but did not feel like there was enough depth to the characters. We had trouble understanding some of Rosa's actions and feelings. Some of the writing was VERY descriptive, and then other characters were barely explored. You can surely see that the author is a poet, as poems are sprinkled throughout the book. Overall it kept my interest and was good to discuss with our bookclub. If you read it tell us, what was the deal with all the omlettes?