week3. cartucho –
Cartucho was an interesting book to read. It felt very much like a diary of stories captured by the lens of childhood. The storytelling was raw, unabating, and felt somewhat unvarnished in a very brash, poetic manner. The loose, unknowing endings and the vague misplacement in time felt purposeful, and in that manner. Rather than focusing on the on the facts and realisms of the story, I think Cartucho pushed further into the focal point of each story – perhaps, without ever really reaching a true ‘beginning, middle, and end’ framework.
The child-narrator aspect was something I found that was confusing in the beginning, but after the initial shock of confusion wore down, I began to accept the inherent misunderstandings within the book. The misunderstandings or odd details and eccentricities began to feel much more normal – and the more I eased into it, the more the child-narrator scheme started make sense, albeit in a very non-sensical way. The gruesome stories captured by the lens of a child who’s seen it all before and grew up with it helped my desensitization of the violence. There was a sort of whimsical, non-sensical, random feeling to it all.
I think Campobello really captured the essence of a child, especially in regards to such a complex, nuanced, and violent time. If it were to be put in another perspective, an adult or teenager, I think the book would be vastly different. I think a teenager’s perspective would be very angry, and an angry narrator would be an entirely different book than Cartucho.
I often felt like the narrator was never the main character in these stories, it felt like I was watching from the sidelines, from the window in their house alongside Campobello and her dolls. If anyone was to be said as the main character however, I would say it would be Mama (Campobello’s mother). Without her prominent role in the story, I believe the child-narrator framework would have felt incomplete. Perhaps, this is because some of the stories may be a re-telling of Mama’s experiences, told as a story from her to Campobello, then to us again. The non-linear and short stories often times felt like a bedtime story. The lapses in memory feel unbothered and the strange fixation on odd details feel like something only a child would point out, a kind of curiosity that adults have weeded out of their programming. I think Campobello did an amazing job at capturing that free-roaming imagination and curiosity in the environment of a violent revolution.
My question for you is: do you have ‘bedtime stories’ you still think about? It could be a regular fantasy story or maybe its something that actually happened that someone has made into a story for you.
2 replies on “week3. cartucho”
“felt somewhat unvarnished in a very brash, poetic manner.”
I agree that the book feels this way, but (as your next sentence implies), suggest to you that in fact this is a deliberate impression. In fact, after all, Campobello worked on the book for almost a decade, practically rewriting the whole thing several years after its initial publication. There’s a lot of work gone into making it feel “unvarnished.”
Hi Jasmine, thanks for your post! I thought your view on Mama as the main character of these stories was interesting, as I always thought the main characters were probably the men who involved in the war itself, which were different for each short stories, ranging from some unknown men to the author’s friends. As for your question, I don’t think I have ever had any ‘bedtime stories’ that I listen to before going to bed :'(