La Maravilla

by Alfredo Vea

Overview

“A powerful and enchanting story… a bridge between North and South America. From the very first sentence I was trapped and could not resist the invitation to cross that bridge.” —Isabel Allende, author of The House of the Spirits

Three thousand years of history and the myths of many cultures, as well as the fates of a dozen unforgettable characters, all collide one hot summer in 1958 in the community of Buckeye Road outside Phoenix. From this desert community blooms a world of marvels spilling out of the adobe homes, tar-paper-shacks, rusted Cadillacs, and battered trailers.

At the center of this rich multicultural community is Beto, who must navigate the challenges of belonging to two worlds, and being torn between the love and fear of both. Guided by his jazz-music loving Spanish grandmother and his Yaqui Indian grandfather, Beto experiences all the richness that this community has to offer: Through food, spirit journeys, and manhood ceremonies, he discovers what it means to reconcile all sides of himself.

“Magic realism in the American Southwest… a wonderful story of cultures clashing and merging… captures the color, language and feel of the small-town South in a manner that is almost astonishing.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780452271609
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1994
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.93(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alfredo Vea was born in Arizona and worked as a migrant farm worker as a child and a young man. He served in Vietnam and after his discharge worked a series of jobs, ranging from truck driver to carnival mechanic, as he put himself through law school. Now a practicing criminal defense attorney, Vea is also the author of two previous novels, La Maravilla and The Silver Cloud Cafe. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Editorial Reviews

Evoking the magical realism of Latin American literature, this unconventional but compelling first novel centers on a young Mexican-American boy and his grandparents, an Indian whose spirit soars outside his body and a Catholic witch doctor who keeps a jar of mystical oils next to her silver crucifix. The poor Arizona desert town that Beto and his abuelitos call home during the late 1950s is a multicultural Arcadia. Here black, white, Native American, Mexican and Chinese families--not to mention transvestites, prostitutes and a madwoman who recites the poetry of Andrew Marvell to her dogs--live in perfect harmony and mutual respect. Only a murder of passion and the reappearance of a long-lost dog named Apache mar this desert idyll. According to Beto's visionary grandmother, Josephina, whose gift for magic loosely stitches this scattered tale together, the dog is a maravilla , a creature who escorts the spirits from the land of the living to the underworld. Apache's return presages a death that spurs Beto toward maturity, as he learns reverence for his Native American forebears. Though the narrative line is tenuous and sometimes abruptly disjointed, Vea's shimmering prose, colorful characters and vivid imagery are as impressive as Josephina's dreams. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Marigolds, the flowers of the goddesses, and an old dog, the herald of completion, give the Spanish title to this first novel of magic, deep love, and grinding poverty in a neglected edge of Phoenix. At its center is Beto, a fatherless, prematurely wise boy, and his abuelitos (``grandparents''), Spanish Catholic Josephina and Yaqui Manuel. They live on Buckeye Road, a place of peculiar racial harmony born of solidarity in poverty. Their neighbors in this Cadillac graveyard and tarpaper community include young Boydeen, living scarred under a porch and speechlessly writing down all she hears; and mournful prostitute Vernetta, whose abundant flesh diminishes with her lost son's return. Many fascinating characters with singular, sometimes fantastic stories both enliven and crowd this sorrowful, entertaining, erratic novel. A good choice for adventurous readers.-- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio

Library Journal

From attorney and onetime migrant farmworker V‚a, a bewitching debut based on childhood memories of a squatters' settlement outside 1950's Phoenix. Most multicultural stories pale next to nine-year-old Beto's boyhood in the desert with his Spanish-born grandmother—who struggles to reconcile her curing powers with Catholicism—and his pagan Yaqui grandfather—who can leave his body and fly. Okies, Arkies, African-Americans, Indians who sing Irish railroad songs, transvestites, prostitutes, the Chinese grocer and cook regard each other with suspicious curiosity. Even the Fuller Brush man here is an outsider: a mutilated concentration-camp survivor. All fling about racial stereotypes but can never get away from shared food and music, mutual respect, love. (The Mighty Clouds of Joy Church allows even sinners to tap into its electrical service; the whole community is connected by extension cords.) People live in cardboard houses and junked cars, but much of the novel is very funny; and when people do suffer, it's not from their material poverty: White Vernetta became a prostitute out of sorrow following the lynching-murder of her black/Filipino boyfriend; jealousy leads to crimes of passion; people struggle with remorse for failings toward God and man. Meanwhile, V‚a's cross-cultural translations weave enchantment as Beto's grandparents initiate him into values meant to sustain him in materialistic, nontribal mainstream USA. V‚a's uneasy mix of magic realism, essay, tragedy, broad comedy, and didactic speech never quite blends, but each element—like the different races thrown together in the desert—forms an integral part of this astonishing fictionalizedtribute.

Kirkus Reviews