Luisa in Realityland

by Claribel Alegría, Darwin J. Flakoll (Translator)

A collection of poetry from one of Central America's most accomplished writers, Claribel Alegría,  Luisa in Realityland  explores state oppression, cultural identity, and everyday life as a woman in Latin America. Alternating between prose and verse, and frequently entering the realm of magical realism, Alegría discusses the horrors she's seen without losing sight of the universal nature of humanity. 

Genres: Poetry, Spanish Literature, Latin American

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Clara Isabel Alegría Vides was a Nicaraguan poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who is a major voice in the literature of contemporary Central America. She writes under the pseudonym Claribel Alegría. She was awarded the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up to fill El Salvador for my personal challenge of reading a book from every country, and I ended up liking it so much. We follow the narrator Luisa from childhood to adulthood through her playful fantasies, dreams, and misunderstandings of reality, especially her perception of life in El Salvador as a young bourgeois girl during the Salvadoran Civil War. This book combines prose and poetry. An extremely unexpected gem.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I pulled this book to read in preparation for an upcoming trip to Nicaragua. My copy shows a 1987 copyright date. It’s inscribed “para Kathy, cariñosamente. Claribel Alegría. Washington, Oct. 1987.” It includes references to places in Nicaragua and El Salvador, including the Congo, where one finds the turnoff to Santa Ana. The stories are sweet and sad and horrible all together. I like the combination of vignettes and poems.

[Coco Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single person I have ever met needs to read this so we can talk about it. Luisa is simply me and everyone that has ever existed! Beautiful beautiful beautiful. Perfect encapsulation of truth and life and serenity and heartache and strangeness and unknowing and not understanding and what language can evoke.

[Tom Jonesman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dear little Jesus," Luisa said under her breath, "I don't want to be married; I don't like the way men treat women, but I do want to have a baby, Dear Jesus, and Chabe says that only married women can have babies. So that's why I ask you with all my heart to let me get married, and as soon as I have my baby, to let my husband die."


"Luisa smiled at the announcement, remembering her aunt Lola, who read the obituary column in the newspaper every day to learn whether or not she were still alive."


"The rivers are coffins
crystalline flasks
cradling their dead
escorting them
between their wide banks
the dead sail down
and the sea receives them
and they revive"

Hunting for an #ownvoices book set in central America, I had a hard time finding any translated into English by Salvadoran or Nicaraguan writers. Then I happened upon this little gem of a book, which is a collection of semi-autobiographical essays interspersed with poems, by Claribel Alegria, who was born in Nicaragua but lived in El Salvador from a young age. Many of the stories had a fantastical/magical realism element/feel to them which reminded me, in a very good way, of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It doesn't seem, by all accounts, to be a very well-known book, and the odd spelling mistake finds its way into the translation I read. But I'd highly recommend overlooking these. The book has a captivating sense of crescendo and symmetry, along with satisfying callbacks in the poetry that left me wanting to immediately read the whole thing again.



Read Harder challenge 2019: An #ownvoices book set in Mexico or Central America

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Loved it.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. The title Luisa en el País de la Realidad, i.e. Luisa in Realityland as the English version is titled, is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland. Luisa is obviously Alegria herself, possibly a bit fictionalized, and the names of some friends and family members are changed, but this is clearly autobiographical. The form is a hybrid, like Ruben Darío's Azul. . ., with short stories (she calls them viñetos, or vignettes) interspersed with poetry. The stories are mostly memories of her childhood, set in Santa Ana, and have obvious resemblances to the novel she wrote with her husband, Bud, Cenizas de Izalco. The poetry is partly also about her childhood, but there are also some really good political poems, perhaps influenced ultimately by Neruda, and more directly by Roque Dalton, who is mentioned frequently in the book, although for a Salvadoran poet to write political poetry doesn't really require any models.

[Andrea Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an assigned text for a Central American Literature course that I am currently taking.

I enjoyed the rapidness of this piece & the “collage” aspect. This was a compilation of short stories/poems about our protagonist, Luisa’s life.

It demonstrates the story of naivety, innocence, peace and the circle of life.

3/5 ⭐️

[Dani B · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️ Read this for an international women writers class. This was interesting in its experimentality, but i found I couldn’t connect to the characters because the chapters were so short, and the storyline was fragmented. Also, so many times characters were introduced in one line and were dead by the next, which I found jarring.

[Fernando Hisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um dos meus favoritos do ano. Tanto pela poesia interligada com os breves contos, quanto pelo jeito leve de falar de tantas coisas universais e tão particulares à vida e à El Salvador. Poderia ler mais 300 páginas da vida de Luisa. Mais 100 poemas da Claribel, coisa que espero fazer em breve.

[Sara]

the writing was beautiful, but I didn’t love reading this

[Isabella Castelo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can’t say I full understood but hey, it was good anyway.

“Mi gente latino” -Jennifer Lopez

[nishi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one random chapter with a time skip in the middle of the book before reverting back confused me to no end but i liked it

[Nina ( picturetalk321 ) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this for El Salvador, as part of my quest to read a book from every country on Earth. This one is modernist, quasi-experimental writing, with short chunks of memoir-like snippets, each one focusing on a scene or moment from the character's childhood. These are sweet and trivial, dealing with domestic issues important to the child, often told in dialogue format. The author lost me when, without warning, she veers into graphic and brutal description of torture. Now, given El Salvador's troubled political history, this as such is not so outlandish but coming at me in what was up till then a series of cute childhood cameos was not appreciated. This is what content warnings are for but this edition predates them and lists as translator the author's husband so seems almost like an entitlement, along the lines of "hey this is literature, don't be a snowflake". Well, if there is to be torture I like to be warned, either via an author's note, genre marker, blurb description, appropriately dark cover design or whatever else.

[MARTA Hernandez · Rating 4 out of 5]

me parecio interesante.

[Nicole C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a traditional novel - more vignettes and poetry woven together. Some of the poetry was good, and some I didn't like as much. I have learned from further reading that most of this book is autobiographical - Luisa is the story of a revolutionary childhood in Nicaragua, where ghosts haunt houses with the sound of their slippers, and old ladies help blow up bridges. My favorite story was about the "dwarf" lady.

I actually have been carrying this book for many years. I purchased it at a library book sale when I lived in New Jersey. It moved with me to Florida. I must have begun it at some point, as I found an order form for PC World magazine nestled in the first few pages.

[Ryan H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Offers a creative perspective on the novel, using short poems and narratives to give a witness to a little girl caught up in a tragic civil war and dictatorship. Both hopeful and sad this is a book that can be picked up and read from cover to cover multiple times, or simply set down and perused at your leisure.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting multigenre "novel." The order of the book and the use of repetition is exquisite. I also love the political context (El Salvador, Nicaragua, liberation and resistance, etc.). The only downfall, for me, was that the poetry wasn't exactly *great*, but in the end it's a difference in taste; the poetry wasn't bad, either, just not my style.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though this book is billed as a novel, it is more of a collection of poems, essays, short short stories, bits of memory. The girl Luisa features in most of them, and so does the history of El Salvador right up to the time when the rivers ran red and old women helped the muchachos blow up bridges.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great Concept. I loved the genre mixing. For me, the vignettes were a bit too short. I got lost and often wanted more. Though it did tug at my heart strings.

[Sunni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Luisa is loveable and mysterious.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting part-poetry, part-memoir. It tells some very excellent anecdotes, but isn't as similar to Alice in Wonderland as the title might suggest.