So all term long, I have dreaded bloging about The House on Mango Street. Not because I didn’t like this book; on the contrary, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But this book is so different from any book I’ve ever read.

Then it dawned on me: kink. This book is a kink.

The Introduction really brings this to the fore. First of all, it occupies just over 20% of the copy space of the entire book (of the edition I read). It’s xxvii pages long! And unlike the Forward in Bless Me Ultima, where Anaya blathers on about how great his book is, Sandra Cisneros shares with us the experience of writing her book. The writer tells her reader, up front, that what they are about to embark on is rather out of the ordinary. She says what she had in mind was “a book that could be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or what comes after.”

When I read this book for the first time over Christmas (actually, it was on my Christmas wish list and was a stocking stuffer from my husband), I read it in a linear fashion, from cover to cover, beginning to end. When I picked it up for a second read last week, I decided to do as Cisnero suggests in her Introduction, and read miscellaneous chapters at a time (marking the ones I had read), from where ever I opened the book. And she’s right; the reader can open the book and start where ever they want, without knowing what happened previously, and without knowing what is going to happen—and it still makes sense.

As far as literary analysis goes, and the methods with which I have been taught to use, this throws everything out the window. There is a plot, but it doesn’t really happen in the format of ‘beginning, middle and end’ if you read it from any point. Each segment takes on its own plot with its own mirco- beginning, middle and end. And the characters don’t develop in the same way as they would reading a novel from cover to cover. Some characters only exist for a paragraph, some for a page…and then vanish as if you’ve passed them in the street or noticed them briefly in a coffee shop. The setting, while it all takes place in Chicago, isn’t really impacted by reading the book in this way. The reader may be taken to a street, or a stolen car or school, only to turn the page to find that this mini adventure is over and another begins. The result: a collection haphazard little snippets and anecdotes that unite to tell a story about the protagonist, Esperanza. If anything, I enjoyed reading the book in this way more because I didn’t expect anything to happen. Yes, it is anticlimactic (which is something else this book seems to lack), but truth be told, I wasn’t searching for a climax. Each chapter managed to take me away from the craziness I now find myself in.

What a curious book this is. And for this reason, I find that The House on Mango Street is, in itself, a kink. A written-word collage, like photographs taken of someone else’s life journey and shared during a trip down memory lane, or a picture book you get at an art gallery where each page is a different painting.

My blogsong this week is “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. This song came out just a couple of years before The House on Mango Street was first published. Tears for Fears are an iconic band from the UK. This song captures, for me at least, the craziness of the world we are now surviving in.

Be well, and stay healthy.