Retablos
Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Recommended by the New York Times and NBC News, and called one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed!
The New York Times directs readers to Retablos if you want to know "what's life really like on the Mexican border." "Solis grew up just a mile from the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, and he tells stories about his childhood and coming of age, including his parents migration to the United States from Mexico, his first encounter with racism and finding a Mexican migrant girl hiding in the cotton fields."—Concepción de León, New York Times
Seminal moments, rites of passage, crystalline vignettes—a memoir about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border.
More praise for Octavio Solis's Retablos:
"This is American and Mexican literature a stone's throw from the always hustling El Paso border."—Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin
"We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictions--and he is a master at it."--Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
" . . . it's hard not to consider the border itself as a representation of a 'terrible rift,' a split between homes, communities, identities, generations. While reading this generous and eye-opening account, it's easy to see how, for the country at large, the rift has only deepened.”-- Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed Best Books of Fall 2018
"Landing somewhere between Neil Gaiman and Juan Rulfo, Solis secularizes the mythological by turning men and women into saintly figures—like their criada [maid], Consuelo, and a white priest who shows his family empathy—and monsters: border agents who take his friends away and school bullies."—Michael Adam Carroll, The Millions
"There has never been a border book like Retablos, a collection of smoldering epiphanies suffering the baptizing waters of recall. . . ."—Roberto Ontiveros, San Antonio Current
"The book is rendered in tight, stand-alone recollections rich with poetry and honesty. . . . If retablos are offerings, then Solis' book is a gift of memory, not always pleasant, but always true."—Beatriz Terrazas, Dallas Morning News
"The experience of reading his tightly contained memories in succession is a bit like drawing old coins up from a wishing well. Filtered through veils of distance and time, these scenes and reflections are wonderful and weird flashes of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the life of this particular Mexican American boy."-- Sophie Haigney, San Francisco Chronicle
"Octavio Solis' Retablos recounts a 'beautiful, messy' youth on the border. Though its title evokes Mexican folk art, Retablos is closer in effect to that of French pointillism. Its small dabs of vivid color produce a brilliant cumulative effect."—Steven G. Kellman, The Texas Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this debut memoir, playwright Solis delivers top-notch vignettes of his youth with riveting imagery and empathy, recounting and embellishing, he says memories of growing up brown in El Paso, Tex. Framed as a series of retablos ("a devotional painting a dire event... which the person survives thanks to the intercession of the Divine. At once visual and literary, they record the transgression, the divine mediation and the offering of thanks in a single frame, a kind of flash-fiction account of that person's electrifying, life-altering event"), the chapters capture poignant scenes with both the innocence of childhood and mature hindsight: after recounting mispronouncing "ocean" in front of his whole class, Solis concludes, "To get the pronunciation right in the end, I had to get it wrong in the beginning." That mature perspective is alive to structural injustice: of discovering a border crosser during a game of hide-and-seek, Solis notes, "I'm hiding for fun. She's hiding for her life." He displays his talent in startling descriptions: the "dog who wears his tongue on the side of his mouth like a scarf," the act of "taking English and dropping its chassis and adding some hot rims." These brilliantly told stories of missteps and redemption are a treat.
