When Kirstin Valdez Quade was first published in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker, she excitedly relayed the news to her grandmother in New Mexico.
“I was so excited and proud,” she recalled, “and my grandmother’s response was, ‘That’s wonderful. I love New York!'” Later, they read her story together and her grandmother remarked, “I didn’t know you knew so many bad words.”
Now, Quade is out with her first novel, “The Five Wounds,” a look at the lives of a struggling, striving New Mexico family. “The Five Wounds” has earned rave reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it a “penetrating debut novel” and Kirkus Reviews praising it as “a brilliant meditation on love and redemption.”
“The Five Wounds,” an expansion of Quade’s earlier short story of the same name, is about the dysfunctional, loving Padilla family. Lead character Amadeo Padilla is so consumed with the idea of playing Jesus in a Holy Week procession that he wants real nails hammered into his hands (the book’s title is a reference to the wounds that Jesus suffered). His unmarried teen daughter Angel is pregnant, while his mother is concealing a major secret. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, the book has been described by one reviewer as a (Jonathan) “Franzen-esque saga meets Little Miss Sunshine.”
Quade, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University, is a Latina literary sensation. The New York Times called her 2015 collection of short stories “legitimate masterpieces.” She was published in The New Yorker before she was 30 and has won awards from the National Book Critics Circle, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Foundation.
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Quade credits her unusual childhood with leading her toward a writing career. “My father was a desert geologist, and we lived all over the Southwest. We moved a lot — a lot,” she said. “I was constantly changing schools and being the new kid; we even lived in Australia for a while. And as we passed through communities, I would observe people, and wonder about their lives.” She later graduated from Stanford University and the University of Oregon’s MFA program.
Quade cites Sandra Cisneros, Alice Munro, and Antonya Nelson as writers she admires. Despite her acclaim, she said, “I still feel very much like a beginner every time I sit down at my computer.”
The pull of New Mexico's land, history
Quade’s family is white on her father’s side, while her mother is from a Hispanic family that has been in New Mexico for centuries. “My grandmother’s home in Santa Fe was always home base for my family, the place that we consistently returned to,” she said.
“People feel very attached to the land,” said Quade, speaking about New Mexico. “What draws me to it is the deep sense of history, a deep sense of family history. People tend to romanticize New Mexico, but there is a lot of pain and conflict in the land. The sense of history is still really palpable.”
The state’s unique mixture of Native American, Mexican, Spanish and Southwestern culture has long attracted writers such as Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, and Thornton Wilder. It has equally inspired Latino writers such as Ana Castillo, Pat Mora, Demetria Martinez, and J.C. Cervantes (author of the Storm Runner trilogy for young adults). The late Rudolfo Anaya, known as the “godfather of Chicano literature,” lived and worked in New Mexico.
Nearly half (48 percent) of New Mexico’s population is Latino, according to the Pew Center, the highest share of any state.
“Artistically, there is so much happening here because we live in the borderlands, in this liminal space that goes back and forth between two worlds,” the performance artist Denise Chávez, who is based in Las Cruces, said. “People think New Mexico is all skiing, green chiles and Santa Fe charm, but we are much more than that; we are a fusion of the old world and the new, the past and the present, and this richness is a constant source of creativity.”
There is a kind of fearlessness in New Mexico writers, Chávez believes, because the region has its share of problems and poverty. “We are people who have struggled.”
Chávez, author of “Loving Pedro Infante,” noted that “Latino writers of New Mexico have a sense of respect and dignity for our landscape, our people, our culture and those who have come before us.” She described Quade’s writing as “wonderful and interesting ... startling and painful.”
According to Valerie Martínez, history and literary arts program director at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, “So many writers either move here, or are from here, but they are captivated by the landscape of the state. Their work is imbued with our history of colonialism and conquest, both by Spain and then by the U.S. government.”
“We have a deep and long history of storytelling, starting with the oral traditions of the Native peoples,” she said. “Ever since then, the sky, the water, the land, and identity and culture have fascinated New Mexican writers.”
Martínez pointed out that New Mexico’s literary tradition “literally goes back to the beginning.”
Fray Alonso de Benavides, a Franciscan friar, was sending written reports about New Mexico to the King of Spain in the 17th century. Cleofas Jaramillo wrote books about preserving traditional Spanish folklore in the 1930s. Nina Otero-Warren, the first Latina to run for U.S. Congress, wrote a book on the Southwest in 1936. And these days, Martínez added, there is an “incredibly vibrant” spoken word/poetry slam community in Albuquerque.
For her part, Quade is adjusting to virtually promoting her novel and hoping that her characters resonate with readers. “We just never know what will strike a chord with a reader. This story has lived with me so long, and I’m glad that people are taking all kinds of things from it.”
“I hope that readers are moved, and that they laugh as well,” she said. “This is a story about healing and connection, and I hope readers root for the characters.”
Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
"love" - Google News
April 27, 2021 at 07:44PM
https://ift.tt/3xuTtCk
A Latino family's love — and dysfunction in Kirstin Valdez Quade's 'The Five Wounds' - NBC News
"love" - Google News
https://ift.tt/39HfQIT
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "A Latino family's love — and dysfunction in Kirstin Valdez Quade's 'The Five Wounds' - NBC News"
Post a Comment