week2. mama blanca’s memoirs

week2. mama blanca’s memoirs

I enjoyed reading Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. Other than the simple, yet captivating storylines and interesting frame narrative, I loved the beauty of the words and the prose that made up most of the novel.

It felt very fitting that both Mama Blanca (elderly) and Blanca Nieves (childhood) had this sixth sense of whimsically humanizing everything – from a material possession or an intangible trait, everything had a soul. To point a few of my favourites:

When Blanca talks about the plesantness of opening a dictionary at random pages. “The words, joined elbow to elbow, seem to mock one another. Each is proudly self-satisfied, and laughes at his neighbor, without suspecting that some other neighbor is laughing at him. Exactly as people do.” (page 35 of the pdf)

Talking about Vincente Cochocho as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, as “he accepted without protest the inquities of man and the injustices of nature. Submerged in the water, or clinging to the stones, insult him as they might, he went on impassively yielding his fruits and his flowers, good plant that he was.” (page 44 of the pdf)

Blanca, reflecting on the balances between freedom and constraint given to her in childhood, describes her ability to taste the pleasant things in life. This ability, evidently characterized as Evelyn’s ironfist coupled with innate childhood bewilderment and adventure acted as a kind of whetstone, a tension to sharpen her taste, and has “never dulled the edge of desire.” Blanca further remarks that “Time, as it laid its lips upon my hair, has tenderly crowned me with the white snow of my own name, and has never left the teethmarks of bitterness in my soul.”

Not to mention Blanca’s proposal for writing to become a new form of musical notation. It sounded wildly interesting and I’m glad it was mentioned in the beginning, because it framed the way that I would read the text in my head as a kind of rhythmic and musical consumption rather than simply reading.

And it was these lines and unexpected metaphors that contained a kind of raw, unpretentious, offbeat poetry that helped me more fully realize Blanca’s forever childlike wonder and imagination.

These were the more immediate and tangible aspects of the kind of whimsical prose in this book that I loved, however, I believe another layer can be added to the whole of it. I believe, the characters of the book, perhaps even the woman who published and wrote the Foreword, all exemplify certain key characteristics of how Blanca operates as a person. Especially in her inner-thinking, her philosophy, and her outlook on life and death. Each character felt oddly similar to the Mama Blanca that is introduced in the Foreword. Even Papa’s constant comparisons to God felt like second-nature.

Overall, I really liked this book.