Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna

by Dagoberto Gilb

Book Overview

Mickey Acu a is a man suspended between a vague past and a vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds, he moves into a YMCA to wait for a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802115543
• ISBN13: 9780802115546
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

a well-written tale

Gilb can write. I've always gone for writers who had to come up the hard way, had their ups and downs, never had it easy, never had anything handed to them on a silver platter, so Gilb is somebody I would like right off the bat. I admire the man's accomplishments. There's no trickery here. Gilb takes his time and tells his tale in his own, unique style. I also read THE MAGIC OF BLOOD and liked that as well. Looking forward to other works by this fine writer. I gave it five stars .

It's Not The Usual Novel

I've become pretty blase with most novels that I read. They are stylistically the same so often, with a lot of phony action or angst that I'm supposed to know in my soul or some such. To me those are the usual middle-class to rich kid books with clever inventiveness attached. But a couple of weeks ago I came across a New Yorker that had an essay by Dagoberto Gilb that was so beautiful to read that I decided to go out and buy his books. At first I wasn't sure waht his novel wanted to do, where it was going, but then I realized I wasn't supposed to care about that. it's about as character drawn and plot driven as a poem. The language at first seems unpolished, but it only seems that way. This is a really well written book that made me think about more than just El Paso, Texas and the Mexican border. It reminded me of the book "The Stranger" by Camus--when I was done both, I felt a similar way.

A "slight" novel? Are you nuts?

I only finished Gilb's "Magic of Blood" a few days ago and yesterday went out and purchased his novel. I read it without stopping. I felt like I had read a Camus or Beckett set in a border town. His novel is not much like the stories, the subject of this being darker and deeper, and about people who are YMCA residents, people with almost no where else to go. The novel reads smooth and you don't even know something is happening to you until you have finished it. Amazing. A review (above) calls this work "slight"! The novel is not a mixed drink. It's straight bourbon, cognac, or tequila.

It was weird in a good way!

I loved this book!!!!

An undiscovered classic

I'm a 30 year old white guy, and I loved this book. I don't know how accurate a portrait of Chicano life it paints, but I was completely drawn in by its way of capturing "life on the edge of society." Mickey and his friends spend their days doing nothing, yet I found their day to day living captivating. This novel is sort of the Bizarro version of SEINFELD. How do you do nothing all day? I loved it.