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Take Frank McCourt fold in a heaping glob of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, sprinkle freely w/lots of bathos and pathos…bake it in the Cuban sun, and you have a “memoir” that reads like a fairy tale!! Fairy tales in my world are scary, they include evil (“a presence , real and cunning”), and hardship, but, if not resolved in a happy ending, fairy tales take you on an unsafe, exciting, adventure peopled by brave boys and girls.
Like Frank McCourt before him Carlos Eire, writes better than anyone from a child’s perspective. Sure our child/narrator in this book is wronged by the adults in his universe, but he is a fully fleshed out, plucky child..full of mischief and thuggery and impudence and impishness, and most of all a self titled “spoiled brat” with a highly honed imagination…
And that is why most Dawkinized anti-Papists need not bother reading this book. It will infuriate you! Young Carlos’imagination was honed in the fires of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, where statues could move and bleed and come down from their pedestals to chase you around in real time. A world in which to “rely on reason alone is the surest road to heresy.”
Although I grew up 2000 miles away from Carlos my world was his, “I’d been reared in the Middle Ages”…the world of medieval catechism layered over 20th century privilege and irony, that leads to the disconnect, the abyss, which one should never fear.
And as for Mr. Eire’s ability at “object writing,” none can surpass…"it smells and tastes like putrid demon testicles from hell," "ever since, blue jeans have made me feel safe," "my vault of oblivion.” Granted toward the middle of the book, he gets bogged down in humorlessness, and self pity, but he recovers nicely and remembers not to take himself so seriously, “you see, Spanish culture is built upon one warning: beware all is an illusion.”
Mr. Eire does not spin his tale in a linear fashion, which keeps the tension and action going…youknow from the get go that young Carlos will be banished from his Eden, but you know not when or how. Death, like the Catholic catechism, is a constant theme in this book. I don’t know who said “to life many lives one has to die many deaths…” but Carlos Eire has done just that, doing over and over again what most of us suck at…”always starting all over again.”
For writers and readers alike I give this book 5 stars. It pulled me out of the abyss I truly fear, not being able to complete a book for months on end. Thank you Mr. Eire!!
