Caramelo
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Overview
The celebrated author of The House on Mango Street gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy–the very stuff of life.Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip–a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels–from Chicago to “the other side”: Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the “Paris of the New World” to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties–and, finally, to Lala’s own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.
Caramelo is a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country’s most beloved storytellers.
Author Biography: Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Lannan Foundation Literary Award and the American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of The House on Mango Street, Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, and a children's book, Hairs/Pelitos.
Synopsis
Lala Reyes' grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo —, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala's possession. The novel opens with the Reyes' annual car trip — a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels — from Chicago to "the other side": Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family's stories, separating the truth from the "healthy lies" that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the "Paris of the New World" to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties — and finally, to Lala's own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.
Caramelo is a vital, wise, romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country's most beloved storytellers.
Publishers Weekly
With the ability to make listeners laugh out loud with her humor, get lumps in their throats with her poignancy and leave them thinking about her characters long after they've hit the stop button, Cisneros is a master storyteller and performer. Her sweeping tale of the Reyes family, with the charmingly innocent Lala Reyes at its center, moves from 1920s Mexico City and Acapulco to 1950s Chicago, all the while grounding the family's whimsical events with "notes" to help readers understand the greater significance of, say, a nightclub singer who snagged Lala's grandfather's heart or the Mexican government's initiative to build a network of highways throughout the country. Cisneros (The House on Mango Street) reads her flowing text in an often ebullient voice, recounting the sights and sounds of Mexico City's boisterous streets or performing one of the many grand-scale arguments Lala's parents have. Her voices are marvelous. She perfectly portrays the Awful Grandmother's bitterness (the old lady loved to remind her son, "Wives come and go, but mothers, you have only one!") and sweetly croons the birthday songs Lala and her brothers sing to their father. This is a treat of an audio, combining a fantastic narrative with an equally excellent reading. Based on the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 12, 2002). (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
"This book," Eduardo Galeano writes, "is a crowded train, a never-stop round-trip train going and coming back and going again between Mexico and the U.S.A., across the frontiers of land and time: full of voices, full of music, made from memory, making life." Anyone who has ever read a Sandra Cisneros novel knows these large families, with their noisy gatherings, and their weekend feasts of renewal.Publishers Weekly
With the ability to make listeners laugh out loud with her humor, get lumps in their throats with her poignancy and leave them thinking about her characters long after they've hit the stop button, Cisneros is a master storyteller and performer. Her sweeping tale of the Reyes family, with the charmingly innocent Lala Reyes at its center, moves from 1920s Mexico City and Acapulco to 1950s Chicago, all the while grounding the family's whimsical events with "notes" to help readers understand the greater significance of, say, a nightclub singer who snagged Lala's grandfather's heart or the Mexican government's initiative to build a network of highways throughout the country. Cisneros (The House on Mango Street) reads her flowing text in an often ebullient voice, recounting the sights and sounds of Mexico City's boisterous streets or performing one of the many grand-scale arguments Lala's parents have. Her voices are marvelous. She perfectly portrays the Awful Grandmother's bitterness (the old lady loved to remind her son, "Wives come and go, but mothers, you have only one!") and sweetly croons the birthday songs Lala and her brothers sing to their father. This is a treat of an audio, combining a fantastic narrative with an equally excellent reading. Based on the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 12, 2002). (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Criticas
American novelist, essayist, and poet Cisneros has been acclaimed for bringing the perspective of Chicana women into the mainstream with works such as La casa en Mango Street (The House on Mango Street, Vintage Espa ol, 1994). Here, she tells the multigenerational story of a working-class immigrant Mexican family through the eyes of granddaughter Lala. Cisneros describes the complexity of an "in-between" world in which cultural and language exchanges between the United States and Mexico shape the ways family members communicate with one another. The original English-language text is flecked with Chicano slang and idioms that acquire poetic connotations within the narrative as a whole. Chicano language reflects the hybrid world of double references, of those who live in two countries at the same time, and, as award-winning poet and translator Valenzuela explains in her introductory note, this is "the authentic reality and unmistakable personality of the Mexican immigrant in the States." Valenzuela, who also translated Cisneros's El arroyo de la llorona (Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Vintage Espa ol, 1996), here re-creates this unique border language by blending modern Mexican Spanish and the regionalisms and archaisms common to U.S. Chicanos (derived from sources that include N huatl and 17th-century Spanish) with English expressions. She achieves accurate phonetic transpositions "Guat's a matter" for "what's the matter" and "seim tu yu moder!" for "same to you mother!" as well as alliterations, assonances (chequear for "check"), and onomatopoeic sounds ("chas, chas" for snipping scissors). Valenzuela also leaves Cisneros's blend of English and Spanish words ("mop" becomesmopear and felicidades turns into "happinesses") and, in many cases, mixes both languages following a Spanish syntax, as in "Tengo sleepy" ("I am sleepy"). However, she is always careful that the terms she uses mero ("simple"), hocicona ("big mouth"), and g era ("a light-skinned person"), for instance are of Mexican origin instead of drawing on other Latin American Spanish. In addition to effectively reproducing Cisneros's manipulation of linguistic codes, Valenzuela also manages to convey her sensual descriptions, dialog, and the emphasis she puts on odors, colors, and textures. The innovative footnotes, with references to Mexican politics and customs and pop culture icons like Clark Gable, Elvis, and P nfila Palafox, are worth noting, as they capture the idiosyncrasies of the Mexican American mindset. Just as the English-language version of this book conveys Chicano culture and concerns to a wider American audience, this excellent translation distills the border experiences for Spanish speakers. An essential addition to all libraries and bookstores interested in contemporary Mexican American fiction and Chicano dialects. [The English-language edition was published simultaneously by Knopf. Ed.] Isabel Cuadrado, New York City Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
This novel tells the story of Carmelo's life as a child of Mexican parents, growing up in Chicago and Texas, but steeped in the ancient culture of her family. Her childhood summers are spent in Mexico City when her entire family would make the long trip from Chicago in a caravan of cars to Awful Grandmother's house on Destiny Street. Her life becomes a blend of Mexican and American culture, simmered in the often boiling emotions of family love and spiced with her own personality and growing pains. The experience of being a child of immigrants, with its richness and identity crises, is told lovingly and with humor and in a language filled with images of Mexico and 1950s and '60s America. Jumping from Carmelo's childhood to the history of her grandparents and parents, to her adolescence, Cisneros creates a melange of family that retains the flavor of each individual character but expresses that strange blend that identifies each family as unique. KLIATT Codes: SA-Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, Vintage, 439p., Ages 15 to adult.— Nola Theiss
From The Critics
Sandra Cisneros's protagonist, Celaya (Lala) Reyes, like Cisneros herself, experiences much of her childhood in Chicago. Lala's father is a furniture upholsterer who moves his family from Mexico City to Chicago and then to San Antonio in search of a better life. With six older brothers, Lala is her parents' youngest child and only daughter in a novel largely about family history and family stories (not necessarily the same thing) and how members of generations of a family interact. The title comes from Lala's fascination with her friend Candelaria's skin color, which is caramelo in Spanish, or caramel in English; Lala notices the various family branches of her relatives have various skin tones, depending on their heritage. Anyone who has ever gone on vacation to visit a family matriarch can relate to the Reyes family trips from Chicago to Mexico City to visit the "Awful Grandmother." And anyone who lives among multiple cultures will also relate to Lala's experience as a member of at least two very distinct cultures: Mexican and American. Due to its length and complexity, Caramelo may be more popular with older, more advanced high school readers. 2002, Knopf, 439 pp., Ages young adult.—Melissa Noeth