"Contar la Vida de Una Familia es Tambien Contrar la Vida de un Pais": Exploring Personal and Cultural Identity in Ana Maria Shua's El Libro de Los Recuerdos‪.‬

ANA Maria Shua declared, in an interview with Beth Pollack in 1994, that if her books had anything in common, it was a certain ironic humor. Shua's special humor, expressed in the porteno Spanish she wields so well, invites the reader to enter into the world created in El libro de los recuerdos (1994) just as it captivated readers of her earlier novels Los amores de Laurita (1984), El marido argentino promedio (1991), or her short story collections Viajando se conoce gente (1988) or Los dias de pesca (1981), to name just a few of her many publications. El libro de los recuerdos tells the story of several generations of a Jewish Argentine family, the Rimetka family. As a narrative of personal, familial, cultural and national identity, the novel offers us the opportunity to explore the ways in which both gender and identity are constructed in and by language and how religion, race, class and politics form part of that construction. Like the monumental novel of the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien anos de soledad, or that of the Brazilian Nelida Pinon, A republica dos sonhos, this Argentine novel employs a family saga to explore the question of national identity. In her semi-autobiographical novel, A republica dos sonhos (1984), Pinon tells the heroic saga of a Brazilian family with its origins in Galicia. In the novel, it is the granddaughter Breta who is going to write the story of the family. Pinon, like her character Breta, is the granddaughter of Galician immigrants and has inherited from her own grandfather Daniel this desire to "hacer las Americas," a desire she fulfills with her writing.