My grandfather and my (great) uncle Dmitri were football fans and Cal fans, but they rooted for Stanford due to scandalous decisions made by the Cal coach in 1928. My father was 4 at the time and did not understand the details of the scandal. The result, however, is that he was taken from Berkeley … More “An athletic organization posing as an academic establishment”

Staged after the death of the lovers and their father, and the loss of the family lands and fortune, María asks the reader to mourn a world that felt moribund well before its passing. The noble characters seem marked for death: María suffers from the epilepsy that also felled her mother, and Efraín’s father spends … More 365 — now I have finished my clarion call, and can go into the material, but is this repetitive already?

This unknown novel, Sofía. It plays on Cecilia Valdés and keeps saying “las apariencias engañan.” Axé.

Set largely on slave plantations, all three novels are key works in their national canons. Like several other narratives from the Latin American nineteenth century, their plots feature romances that fail due to varying combinations of incest and miscegenation. In Cecilia Valdés most clearly, the patriarch Cándido Gamboa is the literal father of both lovers. … More 290