The book this week was quite a change a pace compared to the other reads in this course. The narration from the child’s perspective is quite a unique one compared to other books with a youthful and innocent narrator; there are a lot of nice stylistic touches that reminded me of my own childhood as well. In particular, the narrator created a list (I’m not quite sure what the point of it was) that detailed how the world is broken up into 3 places, or types of “spells” such as yawning and “attacks”. I don’t know where the childhood fixation on creating weird lists of things comes from, but I think the effect of the text was very strong. It certainly reminded me of all the goofy things I was up to as a child, and really brought me back to how you view life when you are younger. Perhaps that is a child’s own way to figure out and establish some control for the world around them, as if to say “I was here, and I experienced all of this, and I want you to know that I figured all this out”.

One thing I didn’t expect from this book was for the focus to not be solely on how parental roles influence the way our lives play out, or to outline the different ways different parents and their actions influence the way children grow up (basically, some form of trauma dump). Obviously the focus of the book is the relationship between these characters within this family, but the personal relationship (or emotional development, better put) between the narrator and Papi are quite distant at times, speaking from seeing a choppy focus of her emotional journey with these parental figures through all these tumultuous events. I think a better example/ piece of evidence would be how Mami is portrayed throughout this story, and how her significance to the narrator is not really conveyed, as if they way they live together isn’t moulding who she is as a person. They merely appear as “figures”. To some effect, the distance does highlight that gap between her and Papi, in that he is often not there when he says he will be or shows up when it wasn’t expected of him to. This probably reveals a message about distant fathers and the fascination and admiration that comes with such an enigmatic figure.  But I think another reason for this portrayal is to convey a broader message that isn’t limited to the theme of “family” or “parental figures”, as Jon said in the lecture video, maybe it is to convey other effects such as the portrayal of the macho cacique archetype, or some broader societal meaning.

To end with a question, how did you feel about the narrator’s childlike storytelling; did it remind you of anything, or was there anything especially notable to you about it? Why so?