Mama Blanca’s Memoirs by Teresa de la Parra is a fictional edited memoir of a woman who grew up as the daughter of the owner of a plantation in Venezuela but then moves to the capital city Caracas when he sells the plantation. Some of the themes that interested me most were of beauty, nostalgia and the grief of its loss, as well as the figure of Blanca Nieves’ father, and her mother’s stories to her.
The nostalgia with which Piedra Azul is described puts a layer of beauty over everything extending even to Cochocho. Elegance and grace are a recurring theme and give most things on the plantation a sense of harmony and peace. These features are embodied in Aurora, whose name translates to ‘dawn.’ Aurora dies when the dawn of the young sisters’ lives die and with it the peace and beauty of the plantation. The death of a child could also point to the death of play for the girls, which is greatly restricted by the city and school. The grief at the loss of the sister is one that they will carry for the rest of their lives, much like the loss of their own lives in the country. Juan Manuel is a slightly comedic character in his failed attempts at control over his plantation. The lecture highlighted themes of masculinity and a lack of hegemony here. The situational irony of his figure and influence countering the reader’s expectation based on the usual masculinised narratives of similar settings brought a quiet joy and lightness to these scenes.
The text reminds me of the novel Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, which I am currently reading. It too tells the account of a childhood in the country but through the memory of the child now in late middle-age. It is also made clear that these memories are largely unreliable but in a slightly more extreme way. Many of the stories of the young boy are completely fantastical, having been warped by the memory of the emotion rather than the factual events. Although the memoirs of Blanca never cross the line to fantasy and impossibility, the backdrop of Gaiman’s novel helped to highlight how much nostalgia, emotion and present circumstances change memory.
I personally, really enjoyed this work. It has genuinely left me missing Piedra Azul and mourning its state before Blanca’s family left. It gave a light feeling of beauty and whimsy that are sometimes hard to find in literature. Despite the some darker sides of society, politics and inequity at the time the perspective of a child, although she is privileged, forgives theses aspects due to her innocence.
Question: What might the ever changing stories told by Blanca Nieves’ mother represent? Do they simply respond to the whims of a child? Or are they a symbol for pluralism?
Question: To what extent does the memoir lose or gain value though having been edited prior to publication? Can the narrator be trusted to not have over-edited so as to fit into the ‘fashion’ of published biograhies?