The Aguero Sisters - Hardcover

Garcia, Cristina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679450904 ISBN 13: 9780679450900

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

In this novel of family history and myth, Christina Garcia gives us Reina and Constancia Aguero, sisters who grew up in Cuba, but who haven't talked in thirty years--not since Constancia snuck out of Cuba and crossed the water to the United States, where she assimilated into her adopted country's culture as completely and deeply as she could. The beautiful and charismatic Reina, meanwhile, stayed in Cuba where she became a skilled electrician and a staunch supporter of la revolucion. The long-estranged sisters are finally heading toward a reunion, and as they come together their own stories and the legacy of their scientist-parents is told and retold in an elegantly written novel that investigates the several natures of identity--personal, familial, and even national.

From the Publisher:

Excerpts from reviews of Cristina García's The Agüero
Sisters

"An extraordinary new novel does justice to the Cuba of history as well as
the Cuba of imagination....Garcia has crafted a beautifully rounded work
of art, as warm and wry and sensuous as the island she so clearly loves."

--Time

"In 1992, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban announced the
presence of a new star in the American literary firmament.... Garcia's
remarkable second novel, The Agüero Sisters, is even better, a
deeper, more profound plunge into the mysteries of loyalty, love and
identity (national, familial and otherwise)....Cristina Garcia again
proves herself a gifted chronicler of exile's promise and peril."

--Newsday

"Five years after her debut, the former journalist has made good on her
early promise with a superb second novel, The Agüero
Sisters....With sensual prose and a plot that captures the angst of
the Cuban diaspora...Garcia seductively draws us in and refuses to let go."

--Newsweek

"The conventions of magic realism can either amplify the story and give it
resonance or fragment the narrative, draining it of clarity. Garcia's
beautifully written second novel...seems to embody both extremes....Her
prose is lush and rhythmic, so that the novel has an almost feverish air."

--Booklist

"A bold and very richly detailed portrait...Fluid, graceful, and extremely
rewarding: a work of high seriousness and rich detail."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Cristina Garcia neatly sidesteps the curse of the much-feted first
novel...with the assured The Agüero Sisters, a vibrant tale of
a repressed Manhattan cosmetics saleswomen and her sexy, Havana-based
sister that blends family, culture, and Garcia's shapely prose into a
rich, velvety world one is loath to leave."

--Elle

"This is no paint-by-numbers allegory. Garcia's characters are
three-dimensional and her novel is filled with rich and compelling detail."

--San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679450904
• ISBN 13: 9780679450900
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299