Borrowed from CLP on 8/17/22 to read for her interview at City of Asylum on August 23. NYT Editor’s Choice 2018
P. 210
https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/13364/fruit-of-the-drunken-tree
She said this at Goodreads:
I recommend the English version, which was the original. I wrote about my complicated relationship to English and Spanish and the writing of this novel in this essay:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/18/translation-as-an-arithmetic-of-loss/
She also said this about an invasión:
An invasión would be land in which a displaced community would do a settlement. I heard this term used in Bogotá and some of Santander, the idea being that the government is the owner of the land, and that the displaced community seeking refuge in it are "invading." I thought it's an unkind term to talk about community needs of people who have been displaced, but wanted Chula, who is middle class, to use the term without "thought."
A theme: what is the responsibility of those with choices to those without?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/books/review/ingrid-rojas-contreras-fruit-of-the-drunken-tree.html
Petrona’s silence
Like a statue
Saint, poet, ghost, victim (of witchcraft, politics, poverty, machismo, and heartbreak)
Extraordinary insight into the mind of a 9-year-old girl. Perhaps autobiographical - in which case an extraordinary imaginative flight into the circumstances of a 15-year-old from the invasión and her family. Wonderful rendition of the inscrutable actions and motivations of. Grownups from the p.o.v. of a 9-year-old girl.
Many *homely* details (vividly specific) of observation
Guilt feelings, 120-21,
Orange hill, air, dirt, 179.
How pregnancy disadvantages women and and reduces, if not eliminates, agency.
How patriarchy and machismo spoil relationships and reduce, if not eliminate, agency.
How the beaten women won’t tell on their abusers, reduces agency,
How to maintain agency, power, p. 168
Chula has no one to turn to for information, for advice, for help 164
Superstition:
Purgatory Spot, blessed souls, 25-26
menace of the dead stranger, 95
what a serious thing it was to swear on someone’s life, 100
counting your birth star, 120 (even chickens),
reading life in the stars, 121
Palm reading 132
Spirit smoke causes asthma 158
Ghosts and guerrillas 172
Candle that doesn’t blow out 183
Tío Mauricio the witch 184-85
His snail shell to blame 192
Oligarch as witch 199
A dark saint 204, 219
Oligarch, oligarch’s mansion 27-28, target? 198
Chula, Mamá, Papá, Cassandra,
Petrona, Mami, Papi, Ramón, Aurora, Ramón, Fernandito, Bernardo, Patricio, Umberto, Uriel
Father, Tobias, Ricardo, taken by paramilitary 158
Questions:
Did you take palo borracho and make it an almost magical thing?
Are there really people like Petrona’s Papi?
The effort to get to the U.S. reminds me of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (b. 1977 in Nigeria) short story, The American Embassy, but that one ended in failure due to the enervating grief of the protagonist.
