Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories

by Susana Chavez-Silverman, Paul Allatson (Foreword)

A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author’s inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional "crónica" make this memoir compelling and powerful. Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman.

Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine’s Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.

174 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2004

Reviews

[Adam Teicholz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jen, it's not a straightforward novel or memoir, granted; it's episodic, in the tradition of the the Spanish Golden Age crónicas she's winking at. But for me it was the opposite of disjointed. I kept thinking how... *jointed* it was. Each localized, intimate chapter slips and bends into the next until slowly, over the course of the book, you realize that taken together the joints make out a kind of skeleton of ideas about place, identity, love, and loss.

And as for Chavez-Silverman's being a distant, bougie, postmodern tourist, I just came away with the opposite impression. God, she practically bled on every page! I'm not sure how much "explicit discussion about class and race" or analysis of the Argentine economic crisis you're really looking for, but maybe dizzy, intensely personal Spanglish free verse isn't the best medium for it.

Anyway, I've never read anything like this book before, and I still don't quite know what to make of it -- but it moved me. She constructs her own character beautifully over the course of the crónicas through fearless self-exposure and, as everyone else has pointed out, a totally unique use of language -- giddy and self-conscious but always fluid and organic. When she jerks you from Argentina to the LA suburbs and makes you laugh about it -- count me in for this stuff.

"O sea que no es sólo en Buenos Aires donde esta mi represa se desborda. (Love that word for overflow. Desbordar. Loses its borders.) Where words, a la sombra de las palmeras milenarias del Jardin Botanico, come to life. Es tambien en este mi Inland Empire, this place you have called a bleached out, desolate apocalypse de abandono y imminent doom just itching to happen."

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exclusively for the flagrantly bilingual (at least), sobre todo if you are porteño! But the message is NOT just the medium. A riotously emotional (or emotionally riotous) account of the author's contacts with her many worlds. Have now read it twice!

[Scott Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love that Killer Crónicas that it takes the traditions of a crónica, a travel journal about encountering distant lands and creates it into the notion of distance between reader and writer…yes, the author travels and writers about them in this book, but communication and knowing is idiosyncratic. She speaks in Spanglish, SoCal English slang, and uses Argentine Spanish. I’m okay with Spanglish and trip now and then, but reading the book would only challenge those who can’t roll with what they don’t immediately understand. The effect is to questions who is on the inside of the audience? It’s a crónica of the author and her life which we are also travelling and the familiarity that builds with every vignette, every place and time of travel in the ultimate crónica of exploring another’s mind.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first book in Spanglish...makes me wonder how someone who knows only English or only Spanish would read it, or if they'd even try. The cronicas are a bit disjointed, full of feeling but little narrative continuity. I almost want to go to Argentina to figure out what she's talking about in the Buenos Aires chapters. What really stands out to me is her posturing, as a "Po-Mo" and cultural studies scholar...because there's so little explicit discussion about class and race in the book. I see a middle-aged, middle-upper class, well-educated woman who travels to Argentina and who has spent significant time in Madrid and Mexico. But she doesn't go into her life there in-depth. She seems immune to the poverty of her surroundings and Argentina's economic crisis, staying in Palermo (which sounds like a ritzy neighborhood) and socializing with other similarly well-off intellectuals. The most memorable cronica, for me, was the one about her and her friends' visit to the tango club. Maybe it was the only one that I could relate to, given my experiences with guide books.

[Chanté · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ay, yay, yay..Some serious spanglish in this one. If you are into that and are in for a challenge, this is the book for you.