Puppet: A Chicano Novella

by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

Book Overview

Originally published in Spanish and now in its first bilingual edition, Puppet is a complex, challenging, and ultimately compelling narrative. It tells the story of Petra (Pat) Leyva and how she comes... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 082632228X
• ISBN13: 9780826322289
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Challenging Book

The best review of this novel can be found in three passages from its introduction by Tey Diana Rebolledo: The postmodern narration in Puppet has made the novella a challenge to the untrained reader. In addition to the fractured narrator, the muliplicity of voices that intermingle, the brutally honest and funny colloquial language that rubs up against official language, the simultaneity of past and present, the history of political oppression of Chicanos by Anglos and by other Chicanos themselves, and the different literary registers that are present in the novel combine to create a cacophony of narration that even Homi Bhabba would be proud of.... Is Puppet a mystery? A coming to consciousness novel? A political commentary? A novel of social criticism? The story of a woman coming into her own? About writing and creativity? Indeed it is all of these things and more. That all these aspects are intricately intertwined in the narrative is what challenges the reader, while at the same time yielding itself to multiple interpretations.... Puppet is a compelling narrative that will lead you into dark situations, but one that ultimately finds redemption. It is, however, a redemption in which all of us need to take part. This excellent translation, done with the author, may help us arrive there.

worth the trouble

This book is written in very difficult Spanish as well as a stream of consciousness style. Read it anyway if you can. Cota-Cardenas writes articulately and beautifully about subjects I could only reduce to cliches, English or Spanish, were I to enumerate them.