Did I mention we have to buy books for this school? Adds another several hundred dollars to the price tag of private education. Saving grace: the students held a used book sale just before school started where I picked up probably 2/3rds of the books for 1/2- 1/10 of their value, and the internet, where I bought most of the rest, except a couple new textbooks. Caramelo was one of these internet finds, because the teacher didn't use this book last year. Since I bought it for $1, I wanted to get my money's worth, so I sat down to read it when it arrived in the mail.
Interesting, interesting, interesting, especially as a class assignment for 15 year olds. I'm not sure I approve of it: it has sex, profanity, blasphemy, an unhappy family.
Would I have found it controversial if it weren't a class assignment? If I read it for, say, Navy spouses' book club? Probably not. I can see middle aged women reading it and loving it. I loved it.
I have a harder time seeing my son loving it. Except it has sex in it, so maybe that will keep him reading. However, it made me question his teacher's judgment.
Then I remind myself about Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, etc. And some of the junk I read in high school: everything from Vonnegut and Nabokov to Stephen King. Indiscriminately.
I was going to confront the teacher about it on Back to School Night Wednesday, ask him, "Why this book?" but when I walked in the room and saw all the pro-life bumper stickers on his metal desk, the "Jesus loves nerds" poster, the Good vs. Evil messages in Star Wars posters, a collage of saint cards, promotional posters from performances of Shakespeare, etc, etc, all over the walls, I lost the urge to be confrontational. My son warned me that this teacher was a little eccentric. I loved his room and his presentation. The walls were covered in literary and Biblical quotes. The teacher has the kids doing advanced GRAMMAR work and vocabulary builders everyday. So he looks a little like a leprechaun, and all the stimulation in the room could encourage ADD, I still felt reassured about the cost of tuition. This class, at least, will be worth it.
But back to the book: Why does it make me uncomfortable seeing it as one of three novels (the others being A Man for All Seasons and Lord of the Flies) assigned for the year (in addition to Shakespeare and Sophocles in the textbook, along with plenty of short works)?
1. I am a traditionalist when it comes to what books need to be read before you die. I think kids need to be force fed the classics. They are not going to pick up Austen or Dickens, let alone Homer, on their own. I've done some forcing of my own, but I'd like to see it backed up at school.
2. I understand that literature teachers want to make literature appealing to youth, so they assign books they think students will enjoy. They want kids to like reading, so they assign books that aren't too hard or that are a little controversial. Maybe some teachers want to teach cultural awareness or social justice through literature. They want their students to be voracious and omnivorous readers and to understand the world around them.
I do, too. I've tried to encourage a love of reading above every other educational goal (to the detriment of my younger kids' grasp of math facts). I'm right with whoever it was who said give a kid a love of books and then stand back for the rest of their education.
But I think we need to teach students how to evaluate what they read by encouraging them to read good books - books with depth of meaning and language. I know I read without judgment as a teenager, and it was because I wanted to know why some books were considered "great" or "classics" that I chose a great books program for my college major. I loved all the books I read - I still mostly do - but it's hard to discriminate between preference and taste and quality without reading those "great" books at some point.
3. There are a lot of books in the world and a limited amount of time in which to read them. Which books deserve our time and attention?
While Caramelo is an interesting read, written in a lyrical style, evocative of an age and a culture which may be unfamiliar to many sophomores, I'm not sure it's one of those books you need to read before you die. I'd prefer to see something more traditional on the reading list. I hope the class is reading ALL of Antigone and not just selections. Antigone also has a dysfunctional family and the play contains violence, love affairs, and unhappiness, but it champions virtue and honor. Does Caramelo?
I'm still sorting it out. Don't get me wrong: I really liked reading it, and I'm glad I read it after just having moved to California, home to so many immigrants from Mexico and heavily influenced by Hispanic culture. I think it opened my eyes to aspects of the Mexican-American culture, and I liked the way Cisneros used flashbacks and conversations with dead people and shifting perspectives to tell the story. In the end, it does come around to defending the family ties that both bind and support. It shows how people we may find difficult to love often have dark backstories that cripple their emotions.
And despite my prudish response to the earthy elements of the story, the vision at the end of the novel is one I agree with. A summary:
The novel is the story of three generations of the Reyes family told primarily from the perspective of one of the granddaughters, who is the youngest and only girl. Lala, in a family of seven kids born to the favorite of three sons. The relationships are untangled slowly. Cisneros uses lots of dialogue, many flashbacks and stories told by one character to another, frequent references to Mexican history, which is often explained in chapter endnotes, and many Spanish words and quotations. Most of the Spanish is explained in context or in endnotes. I could figure it out without being a Spanish student, but this unconventional style might be difficult for some teenagers. Her writing is colorful and unconventional. I can see my son complaining that he can't figure out who is talking or what they are saying in Spanish or about the frequent diversions into Mexico's convoluted history.
The meandering plot follows Lala's coming to understand her Reyes family and her grandmother, and her father, the oldest of three sons who immigrate to Chicago as young men to run away from their mother and toward a dream of more financial stability running an upholstery shop together. Every summer they drive from Chicago to their birthplace to spend time with their parents and sister. Lala's reminiscing about these family vacations is the starting point of the novel, but it moves into a circuitous explanation of the personalities and relationships that both destroy and knit family bonds.
The characters are fiery and dramatic. They have secrets in their pasts that explain why they snap at their children or cajole or complain. They hold close memories of happy moments that they are always mourning or dreams that they can never quite fulfill. The parents and children and husbands and wives and siblings curse each other and slam doors and poke each other where it hurts most. But they are proud of their family name. They have traditions that they cling to, even though they are difficult and painful. They are intent on keeping the family together even though they seem to hate each other most of the time.
As I read I found myself thinking: is a teenager going to think that this is a story about the way families hurt each other or the way they support each other? Would the way this story reveals the weaknesses of the older generation encourage a young reader to wish that Lala would throw off her feelings of connection with these crazy family members and live her own life? What about all the affairs? Should Grandmother have kicked him out? Should Father have run away with her? Is life just full of failed love affair after failed love affair?
There are plenty of criticisms of Catholic culture, also. Lala's mother scorns religion. Lala's father is ambivalent. Lala doesn't want to go to Catholic school. Only the crazy grandmother remains devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
But if the sophomores stick with the book until the last few pages, they will find that Lala finds comfort in faith:
I walk over the the basilica. The streets turned into trashy aisles of glow-in-the-dark Guadalupes, Juan Diego paperweights, Blessed Virgin pins, scapulars, bumper stickers, key chains, plastic pyramids. The old cathedral collapsing under its own weight, the air ruined, filthy, corncobs rotting in the curb, the neighborhood pocked, overpopulated, and boiling in its own stew of juices, corner men hissing psst, psst at me, flies resting on the custard gelatins rubbing their furry forelegs together like I-can't-wait.
The old church is closed. They've built an ugly new building with a moving escalator in front of Juan Diego's tilma. Poor Virgen de Guadalupe. Hundreds of people ride the moving conveyor belt of humanity. The most wretched of the earth, and me among them, wearing my grandmother's rebozo knotted on my head like a pirate, like someone from the cast of Hair.
I didn't expect this. I mean the faith. I mixed up the Pope with this, with all this, this light, this energy, this love. The religion part can go out the window. But I didn't realize about the strength and power of la fe.
A wisp of a woman sweeping herself feverishly with a candle. A mother still in her apron blessing herself and blessing her daughters. A ragged viejita who walked here on her knees. Grown men crying, machos with their lips mumbling prayers, people with so much need. Help me, help me!
Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot. Everyone, the women frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand. The market sellers asking, - What else? The taxi drivers racing to make the light. The baby purring on a mother's fat shoulder. Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats. Everybody, every single one needs a lot. The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette. Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air. The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion.
I look up, and la Virgen looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it's true. The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me affecting theirs.
That pretty much sums up the whole of the novel. It closes with an anniversary party. Friends, old and new, and relatives, close and far, come together and eat and dance. A brief vision of the heavenly beatitude.
"La Divina Providencia is the most imaginative writer. Plotlines convolute and spiral, lives intertwine, coincidences collide, seemingly random happenings are laced with knots, figure eights, and double loops, designs more intricate than the fringe of a silk rebozo. No, I couldn't make this up. Nobody could make up our lives."If only the 15 year olds will stick with it to the end.
* p.s. Another critical look at what young adults read: Megan Cox Gurdon's "The Case for Good Taste in Children's Books", a retake on a controversial article from a couple of years ago.
