(Haga clic aquí para leer esta entrada en español)

I finished reading Maya’s Notebook! What a good book. It deals with drug addiction, the 1973 coup in Chile, police corruption and crime in Las Vegas, post-traumatic stress disorder, prostitution–but it isn’t an “issues novel.” It’s about growing up and love, family and the power of certain places: in particular, Chiloé, a Chilean island.

Isabel Allende’s characters and places could teach me or any writer a lot about the art of description. She can draw three personalities in one paragraph. For example, look at this portrait of the narrator Maya, her grandfather, and her grandmother:

If I start talking about my Popo, there’s no way to shut me up. I explained to Manuel that I owe my taste for books and considerable vocabulary to my Nini, but I owe my grandfather the rest. My Nini made me study by force, saying that “the letter enters with blood,” or something barbarous like that, but he turned studying into a game. One of those games consisted of opening the dictionary at random, putting a finger blindly on a word and guessing the meaning. We also played idiotic questions: Why does the rain fall down, Popo? Because if it fell up, it would wet your panties, Maya. Why is glass transparent? To confuse the flies. Why do you have hands that are black on top and pink underneath, Popo? Because there wasn’t enough paint. And so we would go on, until my grandmother would lose her patience and begin howling. (58, my translation)

I told my daughter about the questions game and now we play it too.

I love Allende’s talent for weaving humor together with serious issues. Here a government tries to recover the body of a drowned man:

They brought helicopters, sent boats, threw nets and let two divers down to the bottom of the sea, which did not find the drowned man, but they recovered a motorcycle from 1930, encrusted with mollusks, like a Surrealist sculpture, which will be the most valuable piece in our island’s museum. (437, my translation)

Reading a novel in Spanish is a good way to learn the language, as is living in Mexico for a while, but I will need something else. A class, to give me training in grammar. A self-imposed lesson in all of the forms and expressions of “poner”: poner, ponerse, disponer, puesto . . . After having looked up so many of these verbs and expressions on the way to finishing this book, I believe that if I understood all of them, the world of Spanish would open to me. They’re everywhere.

Another good exercise is this one that you’re reading: translating some of the entries of this blog into Spanish. (Or, as in this case, writing it in Spanish and translating it into English.)

Corrections are welcome.

 

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