Ana Castillo's voice is one of self-confident, hypnotic melancholy.
Peel My Love Like an Onion, her fifth book, often reads like a diary rather than a novel--full of dashed-off midnight eloquence but unformed. It's the story of Carmen Santos, a flamenco dancer whose right leg is shriveled from polio. Her family moved from Mexico to Chicago before she was born: "My first language was Spanish but I am not really Mexican. I guess I am Chicago-Mexican." Castillo sees the immigrant experience as a minefield of ironies. Carmen works at the Domino's in the airport as a way of being a productive American, thus gaining her father's respect. One morning on a "power walk" she realizes that the shoes she is wearing may have been made in a sweatshop by some distant relative from "somewhere... very foreign, like seaweed-and-black-fungus-in-French-Vietnamese-soup foreign."
As the book moves back and forth between Carmen's dreams of economic and emotional freedom and her erotic life (in which passion often feels as much like a trap as a release), Castillo's fluid style often lapses into carelessness. And there is a blurred quality to many of the images, like photographs taken from a moving car. Carmen's story is most engaging when she experiences isolated moments of independence: flamenco dancing, for instance, for the customers at a hair salon where she is working, dragging her bad leg around in front of the ladies under the hair dryers. The scene--a moment to relish--is almost heroic in its defiance of the exhausted world. --Emily White
"This is the best of Ana Castillo: sassy, satiric and stunningly lyrical. Bravo, Ana!"
--Julia Alvarez
"Ana Castillo's new novel is a celebration of life lived to the hilt. Sung to the clapping of flamenco palmas, it honors freedom and the capacity to survive against all odds. It is a refreshing wedding of spitfire Chicagoan humor to Mexican-American spunk. In a limpid, direct style that blends the poetic and the satiric, this book will make you laugh and cry at the same time."
--Rosario Ferré
Praise for Ana Castillo and So Far from God:
"Goddamn. This Ana Castillo has gone and done what I always wanted to do--written a Chicana telenovela--Wacky, wild, y bien funny."
--Sandra Cisneros
"Could be the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and 'General Hospital'--a magical melodramatic love child who won't sit down or--the reader can only hope--will never shut up--impossible to resist."
--Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Ana Castillo is immensely insightful in every sense of the word. Her work, anything and everything written by her--must be read if one is to gain understanding of the vast landscape of soul and life lived with vitality."
--Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
"History may one day proclaim So Far from God the breakthrough novel about Chicano life that Ana Castillo--was born to write--.Compulsively readable, lilting and profound--.A teaching story that delights as much as it instructs, bringing us memorable characters whose lives stay with us long after the book's end."
--San Francisco Chronicle