Las hermanas Agüero (The Agüero Sisters)

Las hermanas Agüero (The Agüero Sisters)

Las hermanas Agüero (The Agüero Sisters)

Las hermanas Agüero (The Agüero Sisters)

eBookSpanish-language Edition (Spanish-language Edition)

$12.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

When Cristina García's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was published in 1992, The New York Times called the author "a magical new writer...completely original." The book was nominated for a National Book Award, and reviewers everywhere praised it for the richness of its prose, the vivid drama of the narrative, and the dazzling illumination it brought to bear on the intricacies of family life in general and the Cuban American family in particular. Now, with The Agüero Sisters, García gives us her widely anticipated new novel. Large, vibrant, resonant with image and emotion, it tells a mesmerizing story about the power of family myth to mask, transform, and, finally, reveal the truth. It is the story of Reina and Constancia Agüero, Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina, forty-eight years old, living in Cuba in the early 1990s, was once a devoted daughter of la revolución; Constancia, an eager to assimilate naturalized American, smuggled herself off the island in 1962. Reina is tall, darkly beautiful, unmarried, and magnetically sexual, a master electrician who is known as Compañera Amazona among her countless male suitors, and who basks in the admiration she receives in her trade and in her bed. Constancia is petite, perfectly put together, pale skinned, an inspirationally successful yet modest cosmetics saleswoman, long resigned to her passionless marriage. Reina believes in only what she can grasp with her five senses; Constancia believes in miracles that "arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster." Reina lives surrounded by their father's belongings, the tangible remains of her childhood; Constancia has inherited only a startling resemblance to their mother--the mysterious Blanca--which she wears like an unwanted mask. The sisters' stories are braided with the voice from the past of their father, Ignacio, a renowned naturalist whose chronicling of Cuba's dying species mirrored his own sad inability to prevent familial tragedy. It is in the memories of their parents--dead many years but still powerfully present--that the sisters' lives have remained inextricably bound. Tireless scientists, Ignacio and Blanca understood the perfect truth of the language of nature, but never learned to speak it in their own tongue. What they left their daughters--the picture of a dark and uncertain history sifted with half-truths and pure lies--is the burden and the gift the two women struggle with as they move unknowingly toward reunion. And during that movement, as their stories unfurl and intertwine with those of their children, their lovers and husbands, their parents, we see the expression and effect of the passions, humor, and desires that both define their differences and shape their fierce attachment to each other and to their discordant past. The Agüero Sisters is clear confirmation of Cristina García's standing in the front ranks of new American fiction. Translation by Alan West.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307808592
Publisher: VINTAGE ESPAÑOL
Publication date: 12/07/2011
Sold by: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE GRUPO EDITORIAL
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 2 MB
Language: Spanish

About the Author

Cristina García nació en La Habana y creció en Nueva York. Su primera novela, Dreaming in Cuban (Soñar en cubano), fue nominada para el premio National Book Award y ha sido traducida a varios idiomas. García ha recibido los premios Guggenheim y Whiting Writer’s Award. Vive en Los Ángeles con su hija Pilar.

Read an Excerpt




Nobody is allowed to carry Reina Agüero's
toolbox. She insists upon this, forcibly when necessary. It weighs close to
seventy pounds, but Reina carries it as if it contained no more than a pork
sandwich and a carton of milk. Most days she makes do with her tool belt, but the
pump at El Cobre's mine requires more electrical finesse. It is a forty-minute
walk uphill in the rain.

Others from the town join the electricians on their
trek to the mine. Word has spread of the lady electrician's ingenuity, and soon a
colorful procession of El Cobre's truants and elaborately underemployed citizens
follow Reina and her associates up the hill. Salvation or catastrophe, Reina
notices, is always guaranteed to draw a crowd. The rain comes down harder. The
citizens protect themselves with palm leaves and torn strips of cardboard and two
black umbrellas marked propriedad del estado.

Topsoil slides down the hill in
black rivulets. Snakes and mice and a profusion of underground creatures sweep
past them as they climb. The trees are crowded with fretful birds, frogs, and
lizards seeking refuge from the floods. One electrician, a flat-headed man named
Agosto Piedra, steps knee-deep into a pocket of mud and unleashes a string of
profanities so original it makes everyone laugh.

Reina is the first to reach
the mouth of the copper mine. It is an amphitheater of decay. In the seventeenth
century, slaves extracted enough ore from the mine to meet all of the country's
artillery needs. A hundred years later, they turned on their masters with muskets
and machetes and, eventually, through the intervention ofthe Bishop of Santiago
and La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre herself, were declared free citizens.


It will take something of a divine intervention to get the thick, foul-smelling
water out of the mine, Reina thinks. The pump, actually two pumps clumsily linked
by a series of exposed wires, is sunk in a foot of mud. Reina motions for her
attendant electricians to help her push the pump to drier land, but nobody moves
a muscle. Instead they look back at her, alternately embarrassed and defiant. The
machine has already claimed two lives. Revolutionary dedication goes only so far.


Reina puts down her toolbox. She circles the machine once, twice, three
times, before deciding on an angle. The mud sucks at her knee-high regulation
boots. She takes a deep breath, settles loosely on her haunches. Then, with the
speed and strength of a wrestler, she forces the power of her entire body into
her right shoulder. The machine moves two feet out of the mud. She repeats the
maneuver, so focused she appears in a trance, then again and again until the
whole contraption sits precariously on the lip of the mine. The crowd is silent.
The rain continues to roar down. Overhead, an aura vulture wheels through the
air.

What happens next occurs so fast that nobody present can describe the
events accurately or in sequence. One moment, Reina is removing a side panel of
the water pump with her battery-operated screwdriver, and the next, thousands of
birds flee the trees at once, whirling madly in the rain. The ground begins to
shudder and fissure. Reina jumps on the pump as it begins to careen downhill on a
wave of mud belched forth from the mine. The pump crushes everything in its path,
leaving a flattened double wake of dirt and brambles that stops short before a
giant mahogany tree. Reina sees the tree coming and is almost relieved. It is a
healing tree, she remembers, its bark used to treat rheumatism, tetanus, and
pneumonia. Like the earth, it is violently trembling.

The impact rattles
Reina's spine, breaks her nose and both thumbs, and loosens a back molar. A
tangle of her hair is pulled out by the roots.

Reina is pinioned forty feet
high in the tree's uppermost branches. It is another kingdom entirely. Her pores
absorb the green saturation of leaves, the merciful scent of the earth slowly
ascending its limbs. Above her, the sky blossoms with gray velvet, with the
fading light of long-departed stars. Suddenly, Reina wants her daughter to be
with her, to share this air and the strange exhilaration of height. She would
say: "Dulcita, all the gifts of the world are here." But Reina knows too well the
uselessness of words, their power to divide and create loneliness.

Reina's
body is sticky with blood and emulsions she does not recognize. Then nothing
matters except an unexpected blindness, her heart's rhythm, and an exquisite
sense of heat.

Reading Group Guide

1.         Why do you think Garcia chose to write this book using several voices and perspectives? With which characters do you most closely identify? Do you think this use of multiple narrators interrupts the flow of the story or enriches it?

2.         How do you think the Agüero sisters' feelings about their own childhood and their parents have affected their relationships with their husbands, their own children, and each other? What things do the sisters have in common? What sets them apart from each other?

3.         How would you compare and contrast the different styles of femininity displayed by the two sisters in this story?

4.         Why do you think Ignacio Agüero killed his wife? How do his lies about that event affect his children?

5.         When they were children, Reina tried to tell Constancia what she had learned about the death of their mother but Constancia steadfastly refused to listen. Why do you think she so desperately needed to believe her father's version of that event?

6.         One reviewer wrote, "Blanca betrays her husband, but he is so much under her spell that only by killing her can he break free." Do you agree with this interpretation of the events that led to Blanca's death?

7.         Each sister seemed to be loyal to only one parent. Why do you think this was the case? How were allegiances formed within the Agüerofamily? What allegiances exist within your own family? Are you closer to one parent or another? How about your own siblings? Are they closer to one parent or another?

8.         Which of the two sisters do you see as more dominant--Reina or Constancia? Does that change after their final, physical confrontation?

9.         Why do you think Reina has made herself the keeper of her father's books and specimens? Her lover has asked her to clear these relics from their love nest but she has refused. Why?

10.         Why do you think Constancia wakes up looking exactly like her own mother? What affect does this have on her and, later, on Reina?

11.         Much of this story focuses on family themes and the bitter schism that exists between members of the same family. Have you ever experienced similar divisiveness in your own family or observed it in other families? If so, how have you dealt with those divisions?

12.         What surprised you most about Garcia's depiction of life in Cuba and among the exile community in Florida?

13.         The Agüero Sisters focuses on the difficulties that arise when confronting the truth. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you've had to confront a difficult truth? How do you go about letting go of an old reality in favor of a newer truth?

14.         What's the difference between Garcia's presentation of male versus female characters? Do you see Garcia's male characters as fully developed individuals?

15.         What role does mysticism play in the lives of both Constancia and Reina?

16.         Why do you think Reina takes her father's twelve-gauge shotgun and tosses it into the sea? Reina walked away from an opportunity to defect from Cuba in the mid-1980s. Why do you think she changed her mind and decided to leave the country in the early '90s?

17.         Why do you think Heberto decided to join a revolutionary group planning another invasion of Cuba? What does Constancia think of his decision?

18.         What motivates Silvestre to kill Gonzalo?

19.         What do you think goes through Constancia's mind as she finally reads her father's diary and receives confirmation of Reina's story about the death of their mother?

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews