From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* Can cellophane become an aphrodisiac and a catalyst for disaster? Only in a world as profusely and purposefully imagined as Floralinda, a paper factory deep in the cellulose-rich Amazon rain forest. Readers familiar with Arana's fascinating memoir,
American Chica (2001), will discern her clever improvisation on family history in Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, a visionary mid-twentieth-century Peruvian engineer. Armed with an encouraging prognostication, and married to resourceful Mariana, he settles his family in the jungle, builds a state-of-the-art factory and a modest church, and turns to a shaman for his own spiritual guidance. Life isn't perfect in the isolated hacienda where Victor's high-strung adult children fail to find happiness, but things are at least decorous until he starts manufacturing cellophane, a seemingly magical substance that somehow upsets the cosmic balance. Family secrets with serious repercussions are abruptly exposed, inappropriate lust erupts, and deadly confrontations ensue. Arana's keenly satirical, erotic, and fabulist novel encompasses the bitter legacy of imperialism and technology's assault on nature's fine-tuned equilibrium. With a spectacular cast of passionate characters and a plot as lushly complex as the rain forest, Arana tells a bewitching story shaped by a profound understanding of the oneness of life.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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