La voz dormida
Dec. 9th, 2012 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaI just finished reading La voz dormida by Dulce Chacon. I've been reading it for the last month, and the going has been very slow, so I've had time to both get frustrated with the book, and far more emotionally involved than I would have been if I'd been able to zip through it like I would have if it had been in English. My class is meeting to talk about it later tonight, at which point I will probably have more coherent thoughts about it, but for now, in no particular order:
1. Pepita, wow, character development. I did not expect to become so invested in her. The scene in the next-to-last chapter when she's arguing with the priest is bested only by her telling don Fernando to get the fuck out of her house.
2. When we first met El Peque and I got spoiled for the fact that he and Elvira were going to end up together, I got pissed. When reading her letters to Jaime, however, the more I read, the more sense it made. Even if I wish it had been developed more on the page. Although - thinking about why Chacon would have chosen to put it that way -- we're reading from Jaime's point of view, and Jaime has been in prison for the last seventeen years. He's going to get information like that: wham, where did that come from?
3. Oh my god Tomasa. Like Pepita, I started off not caring about her at all, and by the last quarter of the book I was pretty much having a silent meltdown whenever she made an appearance. I just want to give her the world's biggest hug.
4. Ugh, there were just some lines that were so, so good, to the point that the reason I put the book down was not "ugh I don't understand these words" but "oh god I need a moment to breathe". Like the chapter where Jaime is playing chess with Geraldo, and it's talking about what happened to him after the mountain disaster, but interweaving it with the moves that he's making in the chess game, and after two and a half pages of this, it gets to the part where he's standing at the train station, and he gets caught by the Guardia Civil because he's not paying attention because his best friend just died. Checkmate, the king falls. My heart, it stopped.
5. And all of this was real, that's the worst part. Maybe not every single thing happened to the same people with the same names and the same timeline, but all of these people existed in some form or the other, and there's an afterword about what happened to Pepita and Jaime. It's just, it's just. My grandparents were in America, but they were around Elvira's age when this was all taking place.
Conclusion: it was good. It was really good. I thought that sometimes the style got a bit too simplistic in places, where it stopped feeling natural and started feeling like artifice, but it was effective in making me have a boatload of feelings anyway.
1. Pepita, wow, character development. I did not expect to become so invested in her. The scene in the next-to-last chapter when she's arguing with the priest is bested only by her telling don Fernando to get the fuck out of her house.
2. When we first met El Peque and I got spoiled for the fact that he and Elvira were going to end up together, I got pissed. When reading her letters to Jaime, however, the more I read, the more sense it made. Even if I wish it had been developed more on the page. Although - thinking about why Chacon would have chosen to put it that way -- we're reading from Jaime's point of view, and Jaime has been in prison for the last seventeen years. He's going to get information like that: wham, where did that come from?
3. Oh my god Tomasa. Like Pepita, I started off not caring about her at all, and by the last quarter of the book I was pretty much having a silent meltdown whenever she made an appearance. I just want to give her the world's biggest hug.
4. Ugh, there were just some lines that were so, so good, to the point that the reason I put the book down was not "ugh I don't understand these words" but "oh god I need a moment to breathe". Like the chapter where Jaime is playing chess with Geraldo, and it's talking about what happened to him after the mountain disaster, but interweaving it with the moves that he's making in the chess game, and after two and a half pages of this, it gets to the part where he's standing at the train station, and he gets caught by the Guardia Civil because he's not paying attention because his best friend just died. Checkmate, the king falls. My heart, it stopped.
5. And all of this was real, that's the worst part. Maybe not every single thing happened to the same people with the same names and the same timeline, but all of these people existed in some form or the other, and there's an afterword about what happened to Pepita and Jaime. It's just, it's just. My grandparents were in America, but they were around Elvira's age when this was all taking place.
Conclusion: it was good. It was really good. I thought that sometimes the style got a bit too simplistic in places, where it stopped feeling natural and started feeling like artifice, but it was effective in making me have a boatload of feelings anyway.
