The Magic of Blood - Hardcover

Gilb, Dagoberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826314368 ISBN 13: 9780826314369

Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr, 1993

Synopsis

In this dynamic collection of short stories, including eight from Winners on the Pass Line (1985), Dagoberto Gilb captures the texture of the Southwest's working class in clear, ironic, and bitingly realistic fiction about regular people going about their complex lives.

About this title

Reviews

Twenty-six stories (eight previously published in Winners on the Pass Line, 1985--not reviewed) offering a frank, sympathetic view of working-class Chicanos in the Southwest. Many of these vignettes are set in Los Angeles, the author's birthplace--a world of freeways, building sites, and the myriad small miseries of those who eke out an uncertain existence in the construction trades. Workingmen are battered and often unemployed but stoic, like the family man in ``Look on the Bright Side'' who fights his landlady in court when she raises his rent illegally, refusing to be outwitted even in the face of eviction. Or they are resourceful in other ways, as in ``Churchgoers,'' where a construction worker keeps a low profile to avoid the building superintendent, who lets men go at the slightest provocation, until he meets his match in a street-wise killer named Smooth, who dares him to lay him off. Other scenarios include a comic encounter in Arizona between a tight-lipped but dedicated mechanic and a fussing, worried car-owner (``Al, in Phoenix''); a moment of salvation when two troubled strangers meet across a crap-table in Vegas and come away both wiser and richer (``Winners on the Pass Line''); and the title story, in which generations and distant relations of a family living on both sides of the border are bonded together by the magic of a great-grandmother's Hollywood address. Honest and sharply focused in portraying the dreams and realities of Mexican Americans today: Gilb's tales are best when depicting tradesmen at work and at play, but otherwise the magic is fleeting and slight. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

These plain-spoken stories take readers to construction sites and cheap rentals where chronically underemployed, necessarily mobile, struggling yet optimistic Texas Mexicans survive in an ungenerous world. Skilled laborers and tenuous families come alive in the undramatic settings and seethe with the blood and passion that transform ordinary events into the stuff of stories. In "Nancy Flores," a breathtaking depiction of first love flows into the enigmatically sordid fall of a youthful hero. "Winners on the Pass Line" pairs the fates of two restless visitors to Las Vegas who connect briefly and profoundly. Gilb's lesser stories meander into facile or abrupt endings, but the best are as unexpectedly beguiling and unforgettable as the arid stretches between their settings in El Paso and Los Angeles. Recommended for public libraries and area collections.
- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826314368
• ISBN 13: 9780826314369
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287