Lotería Review

Title:  Lotería

Author:  Mario Alberto Zambrano

Publisher:  HarperCollins

Copyright:  2013

ISBN:  978-0-06-226854-9

EPUB ISBN:  978-0-06-226854-9

Format:  EPUB

 "'What did you do all together?  What did you do with your Papi?"  But she wouldn't get it.  She wouldn't know what it was like.  We all fought.  We all hit each other."

Such is the normality  of family life for Luz, the eleven-year-old narrator of Lotería.  Through her eyes, Mario Alberto Zambrano tells a story of growing up in Mexico and the United States, of family struggles, and of the love and loyalty that holds families through tough times.

Zambrano, a former contemporary ballet dancer and graduate of The New School and Iowa Writers' Workshop, debuts his writing with this powerful novel, drawing upon his own experiences growing up and playing Lotería as a child.  He explains the rules of the popular game, after which the novel is titled, in a brief prologue.  It shares many similarities with bingo, but Lotería relies on cards rather than numbers, and each card comes with a riddle. 

The novel is structured around those cards, and weaves itself in beautifully subtle riddles through the voice of Luz.  Each chapter begins with the picture of a card, and each card sparks a flashback as Luz struggles to work through the trauma of her childhood.  The story is non-linear to a degree, as if Zambrano shuffled the deck, but each story flows into the next and each piece of the puzzle builds the story Luz is trying to tell.  As a result, the chapters vary widely in length, but the pace keeps moving.

Zambrano does an excellent job of dealing with childhood trauma tenderly, yet realistically.  Luz is the perfect narrator because she is imperfect.  She is a child dealing with adult situations, and Zambrano balances these sides of her character well, mixing childlike naiveté with a gritty vocabulary and the maturity forced upon her.  Her descriptions flow from her youthful perspective, for example when describing her father’s alcoholism, she says, “It was coming from that man in the bottle, Don Pedro.  He’d get inside Papi’s head and shake him until he turned into someone else.”  Zambrano uses images to explain things rather than resorting to the way adults say things.  When describing her father drunk, she says, “that’s how he moved, like if he were on a boat in the middle of an ocean.”

Luz brings an energetic, bright voice to a tragic story.  She can find beauty in even the darkest of times, and must as she grapples with her past.  She has a colorful vocabulary for an eleven year old, at one point getting in trouble for calling her sister a “smart-ass,” and at another saying that another character “didn’t have the balls to explain how wrong she was.”  Yet, as she tells the story of growing up in Mexico and then the United States, her vocabulary doesn’t seem out of place at all.  Luz also reverts to Spanish during emotional highs or lows, intensifying the experience and highlighting it in the music of another language.  The bilingualism neither gets in the way of the narrative nor makes the book difficult to read.

Much of the story revolves around the relationship between Luz and her father.  She is quite open about the fact that he sometimes beat her and frequently got drunk and smashed up the house.  Yet she still loves him and always manages to find his humanity.  In one scene, he takes Luz into the other room to punish her for swearing.  Then he looks at Luz and opens his hand.  “He pulled his arm back and lifted his eyebrows and slapped the belt against his hand as hard as he could, and I let out a yelp to make it seem as though he were hitting me.”  She is doggedly loyal to her Papi, and despite the tragedy she experiences and her occasionally fiery temper, she finds humanity in everyone.

Lotería is a personal, gritty, yet lyrical story that brings an emotional intensity in its examination of tragedy and trauma.  The complex, realistic characters come to life through the eyes and suppressed memories of the young narrator as she works through her past and searches for redemption, for herself and her family.

Social Issues as Literary Citizenship

For many people, books aren’t a top priority.  Not even close.  Reading, really, especially for fun, is a privilege.  I think that’s something that many of us don’t consider.  But books can be an important forum for discussing social issues and talking about difficult topics. 

As a literary citizen, engaging in these social discussions can be an effective way to not only better the literary world but the non-literary world as well.  By talking about social issues, literary citizens can involve people who might not otherwise be interested in literature. 

For example, on the topic of discussing domestic violence, I recently wrote a blog post talking about domestic violence in the literary world and a couple of books that I feel approached the subject very well.  Reading these books can be a good start to facilitating understanding and compassion between readers.

Which is something Brittany Means talks about in this blog post.  So much of literary citizenship focuses on making the world a better place for books and writers, but it should also be about making the world better for readers.  She talks about how books shape us and help us understand the world, and how good books can teach important lessons and encourage respect.

Books can provide opportunities for discussing difficult topics, but so can comics, as Elisabeth Wilkes discusses in this post.  Comics and books can make issues more approachable and help people understand things that may be uncomfortable to talk about.

Books have long been a place for writers to discuss social issues often addressing political changes and satirizing reality, as Eric Long mentions in his blog post on dystopian fiction.  He talks about why we like dystopian fiction so much, and why it makes such a good format for discussion political issues.

Literary citizenship isn’t just about engaging people who already love to read or write and talk about books, but also about expanding the literary world.  Books can change lives, and influence attitudes for good or ill.  

Literary citizenship should also be about making the world better for readers, and making books more appealing and accessible to those who don’t already read.  Teaching literacy is vital to a society, but so is finding books that appeal to young and old people who haven’t had an interest in reading or haven’t had access to books.  

The world of literature shouldn’t be an elitist one, in which literary citizens look down on those who don’t read.  We should be thinking of ways to include them, to engage them, and to get books in as many hands as possible.

If you're interested in getting involved, check out places like these near you:

http://indyreadsbooks.org

http://www.nwiliteracy.org/index.htm

http://www.in.gov/fssa/dfr/2679.htm

"We all hit each other"

Loteria cards

A fantastic recent novel that deals with childhood trauma and domestic violence is Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería.  The novel is beautifully narrated by Luz, an eleven-year-old girl in state custody.  She uses a deck of Lotería (a Mexican version of bingo) cards to work through her childhood, dealing with domestic violence, her father’s alcoholism, and the death of her sister.  Zambrano deals with trauma tenderly, yet realistically, and shows how Luz works through her past and finds the humanity of her father despite the violence.

In the realm of memoir, Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls focuses primarily on her rootless childhood.  The memoir itself sometimes takes the form of Walls working through the challenges she faced growing up, how she survived and moved to New York at seventeen to get away from her parents.  Yet again, through all their difficulties and abuses, Walls never loses sight of her parents’ humanity.

Both of these stories follow young girls with alcoholic fathers, and in each case the girl is doggedly loyal to her father, in spite of temper and tragedy.  Something about the complexity of that relationship creates so much emotion and depth within these stories, and hopefully brings awareness to the problems that many young girls face.  As much as Luz and Walls work through their pasts, domestic violence still affects their lives significantly. 

Writing can provide a way for childhood abuse victims to work through their past, and a way for writers to bring awareness to an issue that will likely always be around.  Stories can bring powerful change, and these are only two examples of serious books with deep takes childhood forged in a crucible.

Three quick tips for job interviews

I’ve never done a legitimate job interview.  Neither of my majors put any focus on interview preparation either.  But thanks to my literary citizenship class, I had the opportunity to do a practice interview on campus.  Here are three quick bits of advice:

Be early.  

I got there about fifteen minutes before my appointment, and my interviewer came to get me less than thirty seconds after I walked into the room.

Set yourself apart. 

Interviewers are sorting through any number of candidates, likely with similar qualifications.  Make sure they remember you, in a good way.  For me, it was a personal connection to the company, and how their work had influenced my interest in the area.

Bring questions.  

This shows them you mean business, you came prepared, and allows you to find out what you want to know about the company.  They spent the last hour interrogating you, now it’s your turn.

Me before my practice interview.  (Bonus advice:  dress up!)

Five Reasons Why Happy Endings Can Be Bad For You

1.     In life, not every story has a happily ever after.  And even when good things do happen, it is rarely all good.  Most of life it about balance, and good can’t exist without bad.  With a lot of stories, though, even semi-unhappy endings aren’t very good.  Even if an ending isn’t happy, even if the hero does die, it has to have some meaning, some form of closure.  But once again, life isn’t always like that.  Humans make mistakes, and more often than not, they don’t get the chance to right them.  

2.     It seems like every story has to have a happy ending now.  Why?  Partly because sequels are so popular at the moment.  What’s becoming even more common is to have the hero pretend to die, or almost die, but never put them in any actual danger.  Six recent example:  StarTrek Into Darkness, Halo 4, Dark Knight Rises, Sherlock Holmes: A Games of Shadows, The Avengers, and Pacific Rim.  Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Out of those, all share very similar endings, and four deal with the hero personally delivering a bomb, supposedly to go down with it, and then miraculously surviving. 

3.     Happy endings can be irresponsible.  I’ve always argued that censorship of certain content is unfair and irresponsible.  Particularly since I write a lot of military centered stories, censoring the horrors of war seems completely unfair to those who have suffered through them.  To portray their experiences as anything less that what they experienced seems to me to be doing them a disservice.  If you’re uncomfortable reading about war, then imagine what it’s like for those doing the fighting, or the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire.

4.     Happy endings let readers off the hook, and undermine any emotional value of the story.  This advice I first received from Michael Meyerhofer, my first creative writing teacher.  I’d written a story dealing with commercialization and the environment, and ended it with a joke.  He said that the joke undermined the power of the story because it let readers off the hook, lightening the mood and distracting them from the true purpose of the story.  

As Alan Alda's character, Hawkeye, says in M*A*S*H, "War is war and Hell is Hell, and of the two, war is worse.  There are no innocent bystanders in Hell."

      That’s not to say humor is out of place in serious writing, M*A*S*H did a great job of balancing the two, particularly later in the series, but ending on a positive note can leave people feeling content rather than pondering the meaning of the writing and wondering how it applies in their own lives.  

      A recent story that does a good job of not letting readers off the hook is Lotería, by Mario Alberto Zambrano.  In the end, the protagonist makes an interesting decision, one that leaves the reader with mixed feelings and really lets the themes play out fully.  It gives the reader something to think about, and that was really refreshing.

5.      It can be inhuman.  Sometimes in order to achieve a happy ending, writers force characters to make decisions they probably wouldn’t if they were human. Anymore when I write, I try to portray characters as realistically as possible, even if that means sometimes letting them make decisions that are different from what people expect from traditional stories. It wasn't something I did when I started writing, or even until recently.  I grew up in a world of happy endings, and even when I killed off characters, it had to matter.  

      But I think it can often be more important to stay true to the humanity of a character and let them make the decision they would make, rather than forcing them into an unrealistic situation just to find closure.  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy stories with closure, just that sometimes they can be frustratingly unrealistic.  I’m curious to see what other writers think of this.  

      One story that does an excellent job handling its characters realistically is the video game The Last of Us, in which the protagonist makes a controversial decision at the end. It is a decision many people might disagree with, and not one you’d expect. Yet it makes the most sense for that character, and is true to his humanity.

Now, I’m not saying that every story has to have a darker ending, not at all.  There is be a place in the world of literature and film for optimistic, escapist stories, but it should be a place, not the majority or the entirety.  Also, as I said, mixed endings that leave the reader thinking are, in my opinion, probably both the most realistic and the most effective.