Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Cellophane

Name: Cellophane
Author: Marie Arana
ISBN: 9780385336659

by Marie Arana

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Overview

A hilarious plague of truth has descended on the once well-behaved Sobrevillas, only the beginning of this brilliantly realized, generous-hearted novel. Marie Arana’s style, originality, and trenchant wit will establish her as one of the most audacious talents in fiction today and Cellophane as one of the most evocative and spirited novels of the year.

From the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis

Don Victor Sobrevilla, a lovable, eccentric engineer, always dreamed of founding a paper factory in the heart of the Peruvian rain forest, and at the opening of this miraculous novel his dream has come true—until he discovers the recipe for cellophane. In a life already filled with signs and portents, the family dog suddenly begins to cough strangely. A wild little boy turns azurite blue. All at once Don Victor is overwhelmed by memories of his erotic past; his prim wife, Doña Mariana, reveals the shocking truth about her origins; the three Sobrevilla children turn their love lives upside down; the family priest blurts out a long-held secret....

A hilarious plague of truth has descended on the once well-behaved Sobrevillas, only the beginning of this brilliantly realized, generous-hearted novel. Marie Arana’s style, originality, and trenchant wit will establish her as one of the most audacious talents in fiction today and Cellophane as one of the most evocative and spirited novels of the year.

The New York Times - Liesl Schillinger

"There's more to this world than it tells us," Arana wrote in her memoir [American Chica]. "I'm haunted by an unseen dimension in which everything has roots, logic, and reasons - a tie to another point in time. I believe this with a child's certainty." In Cellophane, she seems to be trying to exorcise that unseen dimension, casting the figures of her memory behind a scrim of feverish color and watching them perform according to a logic she can control. She has flown above her own history to construct a surreal but orderly pattern: a fiction that's stranger than her truth but shares its bones.

About the Author, Marie Arana

Marie Arana is the editor of the Washington Post Book World. Born in Peru of a Peruvian father and an American mother, she is the author of American Chica, a finalist for the PEN—Memoir Award and the National Book Award, and a collection of columns, The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work. Marie Arana lives in Washington, D.C., and Lima, Peru.

Reviews

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Editorials

Chris Moss

It sometimes seems that writers of Latin American fiction employ wonder and hyperbole in their renderings of everyday reality in the way an artist might pick up a thicker brush or select a more vivid hue of green. But the onrush of awe and turbulence that drives along Arana's impressive novel is born of a frank contemplation of the natural world and of a family out of its usual milieu.
— The Washington Post

Liesl Schillinger

The New Yorker

Arana’s inventive first novel draws on some of the same material that animated “American Chica,” her memoir about a dual upbringing in Peru and America. Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua is an engineer and a dreamer who ferries his wife and children into the Peruvian jungle to build a paper mill, raising “leviathans out of the earth” and creating a “swarming empire” of iron and steel. Don Victor has “the magic of a shaman” and the wealth of a god, but, once he masters the secret of manufacturing the “fragile, pellucid, mysterious” substance cellophane, Arana unleashes a destructive magic and, with deadpan comic timing, unravels his rain-forest demesne.

Publishers Weekly

Arana, author of American Chica and editor of Washington Post Book World, revisits her native Peru with a tale as bawdy, raucous and dense as the jungle whose presence encroaches on every page. Arana's first novel depicts a family-and a country-on the fulcrum between the old ways and the new, between feudalism and revolution. At the height of the Great Depression, paper engineer Don Victor Sobrevilla pitches his small empire where the trees are-in the heart of the rain forest-constructing a highly successful paper factory and a vast hacienda, Floralinda, far from the political centers of Trujillo and Lima, linked only to the outside world by the dangerous and unpredictable Amazon. When, in 1952, Don Victor discovers the formula for cellophane, his household is afflicted with a "plague of truth," a compulsion to confess their most shameful histories and most hidden yearnings, to make their stories as transparent as the paper itself. When desires are laid bare, so are the conflicts that the family has kept hidden for so long, resulting in interlocking quests for power. The novel's broadly comic first half makes the story's violent culmination even more harrowing. (June 27) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

On the banks of the Peruvian Amazon in the late 1940s, Don Victor Sobrevilla presides over a paper factory and farm, a small village of his workers, and his sprawling, garrulous family. His regular visits to his shaman elicit alarm from the local priest, but overall life in Floralinda is everything Don Victor dreamed of as a city boy mesmerized by engineering, paper, and the Amazon. His wife, Dona Mariana, ably runs the household and copes with her three grown children's failed marriages and her daughter-in-law's mental illness. Then, Don Victor perfects his recipe for cellophane and turns his factory over to its production. Seemingly overnight, as the mesmerizing beauty and transparency of his invention invades and uncovers their insulated world, the Sobrevillas find themselves taken by irresistible urges to confess past transgressions and passions and to seek more satisfying and authentic relationships. As the family upheaval grows, the dictatorship of Manuel Odria threatens the autonomy and safety of Floralinda itself. Acclaimed Peruvian American author Arana (American Chica) treads the ground between the stark realities of midcentury Peruvian politics and changing social mores and the sensitive and honest portrayal of a family in chaos as adroitly as the giants of the genre, including Gabriel Garc a M rquez and Isabel Allende. A powerful debut with broad international appeal, this is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/05.] Jennifer Stidham, Houston Community Coll., Northeast Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A debut novel from Washington Post Book World editor Arana (American Chica, 2001) that blends magical realism with matter-of-fact descriptions of things Amazonian. Like the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo's "Black Stone Lying on a White Stone" and the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garc'a Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Peruvian-American Arana's narrative opens with an intimation of mortality: Its protagonist, the sonorously named Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, foresees his death "in a bustling metropolis, surrounded by doting women." But first he must find an opposite setting, for Don Victor has an obsession with paper. Thus, in 1913, he treks across the Andes to a place that does not appear on any map, the vegetation-choked hamlet of Floralinda, where he founds a papermaking empire. Mad scientist that he is, Don Victor is not satisfied with paper alone, though his obsession endures: He realizes that one can make paper from any plant, and that bit of occult knowledge informs the rest of his life. Still, his larger ambition is to make something else, even greater than the French engineer Gustave Eiffel's iron building downriver: "To erect an iron house in the Amazon had been spectacular. To produce cellophane in quantities would be a miracle." His children-one wild, one bookish, one hauntingly beautiful, all a little odd-tolerate Don Victor's dream, as does his wife, Mariana, at least to some extent. Where they differ, they do so openly, for over much of the narrative, the people of Floralinda are afflicted with a habit of speaking the truth. (The encounter of the village priest with a supposedly possessed and most worldly woman is a stitch.) All that changes, though, when outsidersarrive, one by one: an Australian adventurer, an American mapmaker and eventually the army, after which Don Victor's world changes, slipping "from cellophane to official parchment."A pleasure to read.