The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Alicia Gaspar De Alba

From the Publisher

In The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories, Gaspar de Alba considers the boundaries between sexes, lovers, cultures, generations, and beliefs and presents a body of work that allows her characters to both defy and celebrate these borders. This collection is peopled by those tenaciously exploring their places in the world: an ambitious young Mexican American reporter who quietly comes to understand the profound impermeability of this boundary as his Anglo editor refuses to see him as anything but an underling; a young woman haunted by the memories of her childhood along the United States/Mexico border; a boy who crosses the brittle line his parents have drawn between each other and chooses to show his allegiance to his mother. Gaspar de Alba reveals characters who, by exploring these boundaries, learn to define themselves and, ultimately, discover not just how to survive, but to flourish.

Publishers Weekly

``A people that loses its memory loses its destiny.'' So reads the graffiti on a wall, read by the narrator of the first and best of these works while she and her mother are fleeing a man who has abused her. Unfortunately, Gaspar de Alba drums in that message over and over in these pieces, set on both sides of the Mexican-American border, that read more like morality lessons than short stories. In one tale, a Mexican-American man who applies for a position, in 1921, as a reporter for the El Paso Herald is offered instead a humble clerk's job. In another, a Chicana lesbian takes up with a white woman who has changed her name to Zulema as a gesture of solidarity with women of color. A Mexican-American woman studying poetry-writing in self-exile in Iowa goes to a Tarot reader for an interpretation of her recurring dream about a pinata, and a strange woman pronounces herself the curandera , or healer, of a modern-day Mexican village even though its inhabitants reject her. Gaspar de Alba is a poet, and she sketches the characters in delicate language, but that spareness can also be frustrating when it results in a lack of action and plot. Two of the stories are in Spanish. This is a debut collection. (July)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents