cover image This Eye That Looks at Me: First Cycle: Memoirs

This Eye That Looks at Me: First Cycle: Memoirs

Loreina Santos-Silva. Latin American Literary Review Press, $16 (107pp) ISBN 978-1-891270-06-2

Puerto Rican poet and novelist Loreina Santos Silva's first book to be published in English is an autobiographical novella comprising a series of imagistic vignettes, most of which begin, ""This eye that looks at me sees...."" Silva's fictionalized memoir of childhood begins with a vision of her six-month-old self being pitched over a fence into the arms of a neighbor. Escaping from baby Loreina's abusive father, mother and child take refuge with Loreina's kindly aunt Chabela. They eventually pitch in their lot with a bevy of relatives gathered under the cold eye of Loreina's grandfather, a well-to-do tobacco farmer who threatens to banish the child to her father's care. When Loreina is still very young, her mother dies of tuberculosis, and Loreina must make do with the love and affection of aunts, uncles and cousins. The young Silva describes herself as a ""hurricane, a thunderbolt,"" but in more introspective moments the ""eye that looks"" divines her inner fears. Sexual tensionsDschoolchild loves, the importunings of village boysDunderlie much of the narrative, but at its conclusion, Loreina arrives in New York a well-educated yet wide-eyed virgin (she is shipped off to the U.S. when her family catches her ""holding hands with a college boy""). The details of daily rural life, as observed by the sharp-eyed Loreina, enliven this crowded, unevenly translated tale. For those with the patience to follow Silva's coy prose and the meanderings of her plot, the novel yields glances of mid-century Puerto Rico. Still, only the most assiduous aficionados of Latin American literature will cotton to this murky, minor work. (Oct.)