So Far from God: A Novel

Front Cover
Plume, 1994 - Fiction - 251 pages
Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Hispano with the Anglo, the women with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic and narrative freedom of a Southwestern Cervantes, the author relates the story of two crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family. The mother, Sofia, holds things together in the years following the disappearance of her husband Domingo (he of the Clark Gable mustache and the uncontrollable gambling habit). Then there are the daughters: Esperanza, Chicana campus radical turned career woman and television news reporter; Caridad, a nurse who dulls the pain of being jilted with nightly bouts of alcohol and anonymous sex; Fe, the prim and proper bank employee in constant quest for the good life; and la Loca, whose "death" and subsequent resurrection at age three have left her strange and saintly and attuned to higher spiritual frequencies. Ana Castillo's triumph in So Far from God is to weave the mundane and the miraculous, the modern and the archaic, and the tragic and the humorous into one rich novelistic fabric. Hers is a homegrown magical realism, leavened with sly commentary, controlled anger, and a distinct feminist point of view of the world and the cosmos. Of all the marvels in this book, and there are many, the greatest is the achievement of its creator.

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Contents

An Account of the First Astonishing
19
On Caridads Holy Restoration and Her 4 3
43
On the Subject of Doña Felicias
59
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Ana Castillo is the author of the novels The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogonia, and So Far from God; the story collection Loverboys; the critical study Massacre of the Dreamers; and several volumes of poetry. She has received an American Book Award, a Carl Sandburg Prize, and a Southwestern Booksellers Award for her work. She lives in Chicago.

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