La Maravilla
by Alfredo Vea
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alfredo VeaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); Spanish (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-04-01
ISBN: 0452271606
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of La Maravilla
Book Review: A Brief Analysis of LA MARAVILLA
Summary: 5 Stars
La Maravilla organizes itself as a complex yet illuminating narration that revolves around experiential themes related to the voyage, the epiphany, and the spectacle, thus making altered forms of consciousness--like the dream, the vision, and the nightmare--a trope for reading the novel. The result will be a narrative amalgam that includes love stories, "visions" (particularly Beto's Yaqui rite of initiation), and folk healers, all displayed through a setting found on the "wasteland" of Phoenix, that is to say, on a city dump awaiting the cleansing fires and the new life-forms that shall rise from their own ashes. The multilayered structure of La Maravilla's narrative is found embryo-like in the title itself through its polycultural meanings, namely: a marvel (maravilla, in Spanish), a flower (the Aztec cempasúchil [marigold], as the flower of the dead), and a dog (a person's guide to Mictlan, the land of the dead according to pre-Columbian mythology). Obviously, in addition to these suggested meanings, there are interconnections made through punning between the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Captain Marvel, and with a collective response to female beauty: Josefina's when she marries Manuel ("a hundred different tongues to mouth their marvel at the beauty of the bride," p. 288). The title itself, as a result, becomes an ideological construct in its own right, composed of polyglot meanings--Aztec, Spanish, English--that revolve around a common metaphysical axis, namely: life and death. The word maravilla, in sum, sends reverberations across several languages, either through the conduit of cognates (e.g, maravilla=marvel), or by way of archetypes linked to cycles of nature that thematize ideas of decay and resurrection. The novel might be read, consequently, as an extended reflection on languages, beginning with the language of the dead (Josephina's commentary in the novel's prologue) passing judgment on the limitations inherent in (mortal) languages ("but human language is as limiting as human eyesight or human thought" [p. 2]). Moreover, one might read La Maravilla as Véa's resolve to uplift understanding through an expansion of situations that are polyglot either through cognates, archetypes, or multilingual translations, creating a long chain of semantic associations that move on the surface of a deep symbolic unconscious where the limits of understanding--easily associated with a Babel-like confusion of tongues--are once and for all resolved. Reason and the unconscious henceforth will be overturned, clearly not through a Freudian paradigm, for in La Maravilla one finds this opposition rewritten through the paradox of the "living dead"--i.e., the living memory of one's ancestors, an ancient metaphor for history and tradition--considered wiser than mortals. When asked by Teresa Márquez (in an unpublished interview) how he approaches the act of writing, Véa answers in the language of nude honesty and intoxication: he says he writes in his underwear and with a glass of cabernet at his reach. "I sit down and write what I feel like writing....And I keep doing that and something in the subconscious knows that it is going to fit together and it is only when the work takes shape that I become obsessively focused on certain parts of the work and in making the interstitial connections." If one recalls Véa's purpose in writing La Maravilla ("I wanted to write it in a way that an English reader could read it and understand what it felt like to have a childhood in Spanish"), the question regarding the intended audience becomes more complex than originally understood, for the novel illustrates the dynamics of a polyglot world--narrative, community, family, etc.--wherein languages, like carnival streamers, disperse in different directions. Since Spanish--as a term, not the language--represented what was considered a universal empire in spite of its diversity (ideally held together by a religious faith), the reader must fathom in Buckeye Road--by contiguity, Phoenix; symbolically, the Southwest--the various historical dreams and visions--the Seven Cities of Cíbola, El Dorado, the American Dream, etc.--that, like geological layers, mark the passing of time and the fall of empires. Véa's interest in history is expressed in a recent essay entitled "Caliban and Prospero No More," published in the East Los Angeles literary journal UNTITLED; in this essay, a synchronous connection is made between modern United States and the Spanish Empire through hierarchies of violence and the constant threats and acts of deportation. In his interview with Teresa Márquez, Véa affirms that "cultural sameness is entropy, the death of society....When you throw culture away you are left with what we call in America 'race'; when you throw culture away the only thing you have left is 'color'; I think it has made us a very mean-spirited place to live. People who have no roots don't belong anywhere." The source of inspiration for this "vision" that is both aesthetic and ethical is Véa's grandfather who appears in La Maravilla as a Yaqui mentoring figure who gives to his grandson a moral instruction that serves as a compass in the blood, i.e., as a connection to family ancestry and to his true homeland. Just before Beto's rite of initiation into Yaqui knowledge, he is told by his grandfather: "I will give you a sight of your own blood so that someday years from now you will not be made anxious by wrong questions and you will not look for answers in the wrong place. You don't need to see no psychiatrist, Beto. Never. Nunca. You just need to look into yourself and beyond, past yourself....Remember, you are not white, and if someday you find yourself asking a white man's questions, the answer will not be there for you" (pp. 217-218). Regarding writers considered influential in his own writing, Véa reveals his love for Herman Melville, Theodor Dostoievsky, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas (whose poem, "A Process in the Weather of the Heart" serves as La Maravilla's epigraph), William Butler Yeats, and the poetry and essays of Octavio Paz. Of Chicano writers he only remembers Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima; he adds Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodríguez. "I am really tired of Chicano writing being folk writing requiring no scholarship," Véa tells Márquez, adding that he wrote La Maravilla "as a response to Richard Rodríguez's book." When asked if his writing has been influenced by the late Carlos Castañeda, whom he considers a man with a lot of "imagination," he denies there being any influence whatsoever; the source comes from his own Yaqui ancestry and through the agency of his grandfather. In the area of Yaqui literature, Véa acknowledges the writing of Refugio Zavala, a Yaqui poet whose work combines the whisper of the lizard with the memory of the blood inside. The newspaper reviews on La Maravilla range from the "astonishing" to the "enchanting and powerful." Sam Harrison's opinion differs from most reviews; author of two novels himself, Harrison judges Véa's novel "sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating, always rich and extravagant." Along with Véa's "fascinating cultural information," Harrison finds the novel's "random jumping from present to past to future" all too demanding, for it is either "ultimately frustrating" or "preachy and out of context." More subtle and capacious is Carolyn See's reading, who considers La Maravilla "beautifully written; it's thematically vital for our times." Also of interest, particularly in regards to biographical information, is John Boudreau's newspaper article where he suggests the marvel--in the sense of "miracle"--that La Maravilla's publication becomes in light of Véa's past: "Teachers told him," Boudreau writes," he would never attend college because he came from the fields." In these reviews--mostly laudatory--Harrison's deploys in its language, albeit unconsciously, the novel's own impulses towards "punning" through the word extravagant, which moves through a surface of meanings ranging from the narrow sense of unnecessarily lavish to the more inclusive trajectory out of orbit, understood as unconventional (in manners), the alien in another's home (wandering away from a rightful place), and beyond the bounds of reason (madness). To be sure, La Maravilla is "extravagant" in its eroticization of language and as a narrative of "border" crossings, either in this world or to and from Mictlan. One could even add the "extravagance" of the work of art that wanders beyond the mainstream, a notion one finds expressed at the moment of Beto's initiation: "Can you think of one great jump of art or thought that was ever accomplished by the mainstream?"(p. 221) La Maravilla contributes to the enrichment of the Chicano novel with its historical
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