The Youngest Doll (Latin American Women Writers) [Paperback]

Rosario Ferre (Author, Translator), Jean Franco (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Latin American Women Writers | Publication Date: January 1, 1991

A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. “The Youngest Doll,” based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré’s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes creative rather than polemical form in ten stories that started Ferré on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in Latin America.

The upper-middle-class women in The Youngest Doll, mostly married to macho men, rebel against their doll-like existence or retreat into fantasy, those without money or the right skin color are even more oppressed. In terms of power and influence, these women stand in the same relation to men as Puerto Rico itself does to the United States, and Ferré stretches artistic boundaries in writing about their situation. The stories, moving from the realistic to the nightmarish, are deeply, felt, full of irony and black humor, often experimental in form. The imagery is striking: an architect dreams about a beautiful bridge that “would open and close its arches like alligators making love”; a Mercedes Benz “shines in the dark like a chromium rhinoceros.” One story, “The Sleeping Beauty,” is a collage of letters, announcements, and photo captions that allows chilling conclusions to be drawn from what is not written. The collection includes Ferré’s discussion of “When Women Love Men,” a story about a prostitute and a society lady who unite in order to survive, and one that illustrates the woman writer’s “art of dissembling anger through irony.” In closing, she considers how her experience as a Latin American woman with ties to the United States has brought to her writing a dual cultural perspective.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rosario Ferré shines, and it is high time for English-speaking readers to bask in her light."—The Nation

(The Nation )

"The 14 stories in The Youngest Doll, as radiant as they are disturbing, are animated by ferocious river prawns, trees that weep and a ''town with beaches of white gunpowder which thundered at dusk when the tide began to rush in.'' In masterly prose, the Puerto Rican-born poet, essayist and fiction writer Rosario Ferré conveys a world in which stories hide within stories, the personal is always political, mystery is as common and sudden as tenderness and endings are violent. Ms. Ferré (who has deftly translated the stories, occasionally with a collaborator, from the original Spanish) writes with an irony that cloaks anger about the oppression and danger inherent in being either a protected upper-class woman or a marginalized working-class woman in Puerto Rico''s patriarchal society."—New York Times Book Review

(New York Times Book Review ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 170 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; 1St Edition edition (January 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803268742
• ISBN-13: 978-0803268746
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #204,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this story, May 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Youngest Doll (Latin American Women Writers) (Paperback)

I read this story in Spanish while in college, and I absolutely loved it. I believe there is a great deal of symbolism and everything is not what it seems. I think it's a strong commentary on Puerto Rican culture. (How a woman with a slight imperfection is destined to be alone; How the doctor only married the girl because of her status and displayed her, etc.) Maybe I read more into it than the author intended but it's one of my favorite stories.

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous Writing and Imagery, January 17, 2012

By 

Nadria B. Tucker - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Youngest Doll (Latin American Women Writers) (Paperback)

This collection of short stories is so well-written that it's hard to believe it's a translation and that it wasn't crafted in English originally. The stories in this collection explore the lives of women who cannot escape the ever-present image of the doll. Young girls should play with dolls; women should look like dolls. But in these stories about life in Puerto Rico, women aren't content to just sit there and be dolls--that's where conflict and themes of gender inequality come in. These stories are as gorgeous as they are insightful. A master-class in short fiction.

5.0 out of 5 stars So good!, June 16, 2011

By 

Bianca Penny "B Penny" (Va Beach) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Youngest Doll (Latin American Women Writers) (Paperback)

If you like writers like Horacio Quiroga, you would love this book. The writer is a Puertorican woman who grew up in the 50's on the island in a wealthy family but has a different point of view on the life of the rich and the proo in Puerto Rico being overtaken by the americans who conquered and started establishing themselves on the island. Full of puerrican culture embeded in the stories it is definately a read for all of you who really want to get in touch with some heritage and be interested by a bit of weirdness.