Loosing My Espanish

by H.G. Carrillo

A heartbreaking, funny, and brilliantly inventive novel with “a narrator who erupts and disrupts the pavements of the Cuban-American experience by showing us that the most accurate, if not truthful, fact comes from the memory of the impassioned heart.” — Helena María Viramontes, author of Under the Feet of Jesus

“A novel that exists in a realm where beauty and memory and longing are one.” — Junot Díaz, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize– winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Oscar Delossantos is about to lose his job as a teacher at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. Rather than go quietly, he embarks on a valiant last history lesson that chronicles the flight from Cuba of his makeshift extended family. Evoking the struggle between nostalgia and the realities of the Cuban Revolution with both grit and lyricism, he inspires his students with an altogether dazzling reinterpretation of the Cuban-American experience.

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Estep · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Henry James vibes and Spanglish. Spanish is not translated, but you can always grab a dictionary or just experience the language here from where you're at, don't skip parts because you don't understand.

[Vtlozano · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cuban past, told in a voice so lyrical and dense that the boy's school teacher who narrates seems to channel language swirling around the black hole that would otherwise swallow this history.

[m m · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really liked the weaving together of Spanish with English...but about a quarter of the way in am calling it quits, too much hard work right now to try to piece the endless swirl of images into a storyline.

[Stefanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Evidently he was a complete fraud

https://apple.news/ApRXCvmMwQpORfEz-A...

[Vonaire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to abandon this book after a couple of weeks. It's not that I hated it, because if I did then I would only give it one star. There were some solid aspects of the book: I like how it is written in Spanglish, it was an intriguing angle that I had never seen to that extent before, particularly for an English-language novel. Although the story had potential to be very interesting, simply based on plot-lines alone, it failed to capture my interest entirely because 80 pages in, I still felt as though the story hadn't even begun! The author jumps from present day to past, from first person to third, and so forth, without so much of an inkling of imminent change. I would be reading about one thing, and then, suddenly, about another, and I lost patience with trying to keep up. It basically sounded like an old man's ramblings on the eve of his delirium settling in. Simply put, it was a bit too all-over-the-place for me.

[Rebecca I · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to know at least a little Spanish to read this book. It is written in a combination of English and Spanish just as if someone were speaking and they lapsed at times into their first language. It is a story that tells many stories of the hopes and dreams of a people over time. There is much remembrance and we don't know how much is true, but surely much of it is. It tells some of the story of a group of Spanish speaking people who are misunderstood because white persons in the USA lump everyone who speaks Spanish together as they do Asians and don't see that Venezuelans are not Mexicans, or Puerto Ricans or Costa Ricans, persons from El Salvador or Guatemala, or even from Spain. The persons talked about in this book are from Cuba and they left Cuba because of the changing government and circumstances and not because they didn't like life in Cuba. And they ended up in Chicago - in the wind and cold and snow in winter. Much is told in reminiscences and stories from the old days. Some of it is superstitious and some hard to believe. We see the narrator author as he grows up and becomes a teacher try to tell the history correctly from a Cuban perspective. And then we see the work and work and passage of time until Chicago is also a place which has become a part of the story.

[Maria Salcido · Rating 5 out of 5]

An instructor starts to fall apart and gives his students instructions to delete pages from their history books and replace them with hushed narratives. The blood, sweat, and sugar of the developing globe are stained into the historical books throughout his screaming lectures as his collapse worsens. In this aptly called book, a man's dying moments of perplexing lucidity are interwoven with aspects of memory, dreams, cultural myth, and history. The piece blends an unearthed tragedy into recorded history in a way that is heartbreaking, magnificent, and breathtakingly beautiful.

Carillo or I should say Carroll was in many ways a fraud. I can easily imagine this being pretty upsetting for any immigrants or Latios in America who had a connection to his books and how it might be seen as a sort of betrayal. However, as a Cuban-American (my grandparents fled when they were pretty young) I really appreciated his work. What he did is not as bad as what Jessica Krug did (I believe from the same university as Carillo). He wrote very well-written narratives about an underrepresented group and I can only applaud that.

[Gino Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a chance read. I had been looking for Caribbean authors and H. G. Carrillo was one that popped up as a recommendation. It never became available as an e-book through my library, so I finally decided to buy it. I am only a few years late discovering how magnificent this work of art is.

It took some getting used to the stream of consciousness when I started reading it. The run-on sentences, the lengthy sentences, the comma splices, the missing periods, and the paragraphs that spanned pages made for some difficulty. Then, I thought of how the elders in my family weaved stories with multiple plots and somehow wove them together in a tapestry that made sense when I didn’t let my mind roam while they were speaking. I then got it. And the same applied here.

There were three threads going simultaneously throughout the story – the address to the class, the goings-on at home, and life before coming to America. It was interesting to see how it was all interwoven. Aside from when chapters began and it was known that there had a been a break at the end of a chapter and a start to a new chapter, as you get towards the end of a chapter, there were certain cues that placed you in the classroom or at some location in Chicago.

Living in Chicago, I appreciate enough hints of location by names of streets without coming off like a screenplay that inched up on calling out very specific landmarks. I also appreciate the same was applied to references to Cuba, opting to stick to settings that were pertinent to the characters, not as if presenting a travel brochure.

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. There are critics that can liken an author to another author or a novel to another popular novel. What I gleaned from “Loosing My Espanish” is that H. G. Carrillo was an author in a category all to himself, and the novel is certainly deserving of being called out as one of the greatest novels of all times.

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a difficult time following the narrative line of this book. Various family members weave in and out of the narrative and the location and historical setting keep jumping around unexpectedly. I tried to keep track of who was related to whom and how, but finally gave up. I would recommend only reading this book if you know Spanish, as Carrillo jumps between languages with just as much fluidity as well. The language changes were fine for me, but the constant switches in all other aspects of the novel were a challenging barrier.

[Kel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is a bit hard to follow sometimes but fair warning: I started this book in the midst of finals and felt like I couldn't give it my full attention. I still really loved this book and thought it was really beautiful and insightful. I would love to see more by this author--this is an underappreciated gem.

Also appreciated that the main character is queer but that the book isn't necessarily about that--it's about his life and his family at large. Sometimes it's nice to have a story with a queer character that doesn't have to hammer home the fact that they're queer.

[Amalea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like I just experienced a tornado.

[Jill Sakowitz · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's not often that I don't finish a book that I start but I just could not get through this one as hard as I tried. It was confusing and boring at the same time.

[RJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

An aging teacher begins to unravel, instructing his students to remove pages from thier history books to insert silenced narratives. As his breakdown progresses his ranting lectures stain the texts of history with the blood, sweat, and sugar of the third world. This aptly named novel weaves elements of memory, dreams, cultural myth, and history into one man's final moments of confounding clarity. Heartbreaking, breathtaking, and intensely beautiful, this novel weaves silenced story into written history.

[Abby]

This book is now filled with little stars ("peering curiously neither admitting nor denying what we did or didn't see") and rows of hearts ("that wonderful moment of discovery of just one of them crunching between the teeth to fall sweet, sour, both sugar and dirt on the tongue into something for which none of us had any Spanish"). I got within 50 pages of the end, and then had to stop (semester waits for no one), and then reread the whole thing because it's not the kind of book you can just pick up where you left off. So I can say with authority this gets better every time.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carrillo, in addition to being an excellent lecturer/professor at GWU, is an evocative writer. The experience is frustrating because of the novel's mixed language but it is worth the investment of grey matter to wrestle with its contradictions. A Miami Herald review wrote that it would be of interest to everyone who has inherited a history and a language they could not fully connect with but still tried to preserve---and I'm not sure I can frame the novel's worth any better.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carrillo is a master of abstractionism and his prose, while sometimes too florid and sinuous, moves with an incredible tornado-whipping force, creating a swirling world of memory and color that, like the Cuba his narrator mourns, resonates long after you close the book and walk away.

[Angel · Rating 1 out of 5]

See my blog post on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/20...

[Hday · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked that it mixed Spanish and English but the plot just didn't captivate me

[Sarah]

Paige Harrison