SOLVED. Latina author, something to do with a zoo? [s]

[Cade]

I read this in around 97 or 98 in a college women's lit class. I know the cover was mostly black. The story was possibly set in Mexico or a South American country, and there was a makeshift zoo of some sort. Vague, I know. Help?

[Mlk]

You might want to look at the work of Regina Rheda. She is a Brazillian author who writes a lot about animal rights. Sorry I can't provide more, but it's a place to look.

[Cade]

Thanks, I will, but I think this one was more in the magical realism type vein.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Dawn, are you still looking for this book?

[Isabel (kittiwake)]

The title story in Symmetries by Luisa Valenzuela is about torture and a woman who is in love with an orang utan at Buenos Aires zoo.

[Cade]

Lobstergirl: YES! I went so far as to email my old English department to see if they archive syllabi for classes to get the reading list. No such luck.

Isabel: I'll check that out, but I think this one was a novel.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Women's lit - does this mean everything had a feminist theme?

[Ann aka Iftcan]

Were there any PN elements to the story? (Altho I can't really see a women's Lit class reading a PNR novel.)

[Cade]

It honestly just meant women authors. I remember reading Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson in that same class.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Still looking?

[Cade]

Yes, unfortunately...

[Tab]

Dawn, can you remember anything about the "makeshift zoo?" Was the zoo set on a farm (like a petting zoo)? Did it have exotic animals?

What time period did the story take place? What genre: magical realism, mystery, literary, etc?

Was the story originally written in Spanish?

[Kris]

Perhaps something from this collection of short stories - Landscapes of A New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women edited by Isabel Allende?

One Amazon reviewer says, "The magic realist elements of stories in the second half seemed mainly to be a feverish blending of reality and hallucination (Alonso, Orphée) or exaggeration/absurdity (Valenzuela, Steimberg, Ocampo, Peri Rossi, Balcells). The piece by Alonso described the life and dreams of a female monkey caged in a zoo, cataloging the many inhabitants and overwhelming sights and smells. In the work by Orphée, two bachelors became trapped in the house of two old ladies, living in rooms that held the furnishings of their dreams."

"Cuba's Dora Alonso (1910-2001)"

"From Alonso's "Cage Number One": "The great prison breathed in the night, liberating its vegetable dreams, the tortured nightmares of free rivers and rapid deaths, the fever of sterile encounters, the castrated anger of confinement . . . . The monkey was delirious, dreaming she was biting the good keeper on the throat until she could feel her lips near his flowing arteries; she strangled him with the shoelaces that he had taught her to tie and untie. She dreamed she was fleeing to the forest followed by all the simians deformed in exhibitions.""

[Cade]

I'm definitely going to check that one out, Kris, but I remember it being a full length novel.

Tab, I don't remember much about the zoo or if it was originally in Spanish. I think it had magical realism in it though.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Holy Radishes! by Roberto G. Fernández? Not by a woman, but the cover is mostly black, it features Cuban exiles in the Everglades, and they are setting up an exotic zoo.



Fernndez (Raining Backwards, etc., not reviewed) continues his exploration of Cuban-American experience with a nearly unintelligible supposed satire of immigrant life. The setting is Belle Glade in the Florida Everglades, where the former aristocrats of Xawa now live in exile and toil at the local radish-processing plant. Their stories are told at breakneck speed, zipping back and forth in time, through long-winded and unrealistic streaks of dialogue. At the whirling hub of these scattered tales is Nellie Pardo, who, as a child, was a spoiled rotten near-savante who spoke only to her pet pig, Rigoletto. Grown up, she marries Nelson Guiristain, the unwilling heir of a business empire. Nelson attempts to ease his anxiety by spending long hours chasing the squirrel at Marina's luxury zoological brothel. When revolutionaries overthrow the Cuban government, Nelson escapes with his father's company's several million dollars in cash in a cardboard suitcase, but sets himself free of paternal pressures by throwing the money into the sea. The exiled have various ways of surviving once they find themselves in Belle Glade. Nellie and her vastly overwritten redneck neighbor glue seashells and glitter on stray animals and open an exotic zoo.

[Cade]

OMG Thank you thank you thank you! This is definitely it! I have been trying to find this book for 14 years.

[Tab]

great find! I love when the older posts get solved

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Cool! I didn't think that would be the right book since it was by a man.

[Cade]

I didn't either. Of course, it has been 15 years since I took the class. It may have been for multicultural lit...Thanks everyone for all the help!