Michael Sedano
It’s “stories,” the subtitle of Ana Castillo’s recently published Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home. The prolific author’s work of late has ranged from poem to memoir to novel to drawing and painting. Hence, a subtitle helps a reader develop expectations.
What one expects out of an Ana Castillo story collection is masterful storytelling filled with engaging delightful surprises. Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home is just that: masterful storytelling filled with engaging delightful surprises.
“Masterful” doesn’t mean here’s a textbook approach to short fiction. Masterfully breaking rules more accurately describes Doña Cleanwell. Don’t come to these stories looking for a classic structure and textbook development. These technical elements are all there, expressed in Castillo’s masterfully efficient style by a word, a glimpse at a setting, an idiosyncrasy.
Castillo takes a male voice for the first story, “Cuernavaca”, and features a male character for “Ven.” They didn’t have to be guys in those stories, but maybe I missed something. Women and girls fill out their central roles in “The Girl in the Green Dress, The Night at Nonna’s”, and the title piece, “Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home.” These stories, the characters have to be women.
Prepare yourself for engaging plots and surprise as the raison d’etre. Then there’ll be a lot to think about. The collection opens with Cuernavaca. A son discovers a murder mystery behind a ghost story dating back to his father’s wild youth. Did good old Dad frame his brother? Next, in Ven, a guy mourns his high-achiever sister. Reading her journal, brother discovers sister has a parallel life and the surprise of a lifetime. There’s a horror story, The Girl in the Green Dress Trapped in a frozen library, the girl may never go home again, lured or beguiled by a presence. The night at Nonna’s is a girl’s story. A virgin intends to break all the rules with a willing boy, only to be scared straight by Nonna. Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home is classic Castillo. A girl has to come of age all at once. She takes her first airplane ride, has a menstrual accident, stumbles through a foreign ambiente, and despite a fistfight brawl on a public street, accomplishes her impossible mission to retrieve Doña Cleanwell and take mama home to dad.
To illustrate more deeply the engaging elements in those stories would be to spoil the fun of discovery. The stories have gender and sexual shenanigans, endearing characters, provocative ideas about women’s liberation, tolerance, and home.
Home is where the heart is, so why leave home? Leaving also means arriving and settling elsewhere. What happens elsewhere, stays elsewhere. Is that a measure of freedom, or a needful respite from quotidian events?
Don’t come to these stories seeking denouement and resolution. Above all, these eight stories address events that happen away from home. Characters go elsewhere, discover the story, get involved beyond their capacity to deal, then exit themselves to return home. What happens after the exit is some other story's denouement, or do such places cease to exist?
Castillo leaves it up to her readers to figure out what happens after the punto final, in the home that was left behind, as well as what comes next. For example, that little niece living in Mexico, or the lover left behind selling cleaning supplies, did the green dress trap that woman forever in that place away from home?
Summer is a comin' in, reading time. Doña Cleanwell travels well, gente. Good summer reading with a "Ana Castillo's done it again," smile on your face.
1 comment:
Iconic author Ana Castillo, who has a penchant for literary innovativeness, has succeeded again in gifting her readers with a new way of storytelling. Thank you, Michael Sedano, for giving us a compelling glimpse of what her new collection holds and how she works her magic.
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