The Sad Passions

by Veronica Gonzalez Peña

The lyrical story of a Mexican family torn apart by the fragility and madness of one of its members. Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Pena's The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls. It is 1960, and the wild and impulsive sixteen-year-old Claudia elopes from her comfortable family home in Mexico City with Miguel, a seductive drifter who will remain her wandering husband for the next twenty years. Hitchhiking across the United States with Miguel, sometimes spending the night in jails, Claudia stops sleeping and begins seeing visions. Abandoned at a small clinic in Texas, she receives electroshock treatment while seven months pregnant with her first daughter. Afterward, Miguel leaves her, dumb and drooling, at her mother's doorstep. Living more often at her mother's home than with Miguel, Claudia will give birth to four girls. But when Julia, her second daughter, is inexplicably given away to a distant relation in Los Angeles, Claudia's fragile, uncertain state comes to affect everyone around her. Julia's disappearance—which could symbolize the destabilizing effect of manic depression—will become the organizing myth in all of the daughters' unsettled lives; for if one can disappear, why not all of them?

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction

344 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 2013

About the author

Veronica Gonzalez Peña is co-editor of the cross-genre book Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings. In 2006 she founded Rockypoint Press, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints, books, and films. Her first novel, twin time: or how death befell me, was published by semiotext(e) and was awarded the 2008 Aztlan Literary Prize. Lynne Tillman calls her second novel, The Sad Passions (June 2013), “honest and riveting," and Francisco Goldman hailed it "a beautiful and moving choral tale of isolation, love, damage, and intimate struggles."

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ate this book up. I picked this up just after My Brilliant Friend and it seemed, if not a continuation of the book, oddly resonant, though here the prism of a family story told in discrete first person voices. Four sisters, Rocia, the sweet eldest sister, Julia, the girl who is sent away at age 6 to live in the States, scrappy Marta, and Sandra, the youngest, brilliant and clear-sighted, look at their relationships to one another, to their mad mother, Claudia, and their mysterious, unpredictable father M. We also move up a generation to see the mother's relationship to her siblings, her parents, a story which is directly contradicted by her sister Sofia.

Yet unlike The Poisonwood Bible, whose prismatic structure The Sad Passions might at times suggest, the story is far more insular--the sisters' relationships obsessive and mutually referential. I love each of these voices, and especially the way they triangulate one another. The story itself begins before Sandra's birth, really the mystery around the 'disappearance' of Julia, the girl whom Sandra perfectly resembles--the missing sister, of whom Sandra even wonders if she is the next incarnation. The mystery of the father, the madness of the mother, their awful conjunction.

Julia's sections are particularly vivid--as she has become a writer/art historian on Long Island, and discusses her familial troubles in terms of contemporary photographs which are a part of the book (it's published by the small art press Semiotexte) but Sandra has the lyrical parts--it is the youngest who is the flaneur, whose 11 year old wanderings in Mexico City allow us to see it as part of herself and she is part of it.

One never really recovers from a damaged family, from madness in the bloodlines, one merely avoids or reacts or acts it out, and each sister confronts the scarcity of love and care in her own way.
Gonzalez Pena is so insightful as to the ongoing damage of a bitter childhood. Here's Julia, years after the formative events, in a present-day unhappy live-in relationship, hanging out with a mutual friend:

"Joaquin would get serious, as the two of us joked, and I'd stare over at him, trying to underline it for him with my gaze, that intimacy, the warm wash of closeness that he and I had never had. I wanted him to note it between me and Olivier, that ease, the image of something I craved and which I was beginning to suspect he and I would never really achieve."

Claudia, the mad mother, has many of the most lyric passages. Here she describes a house fire which may or may not have taken the lives of three girls, her father's playmates--full of the ambience of seduction and danger that clings to her:

"The curtains had been white and muslin, thin as light, and the flame on the candle which had been left near the open window had danced and swayed, openly flirted, until the moment that wayward breeze stirred on the wicked conjoining. Romantic, billowing, a tease, the curtains sailing out, flitting mid-air for one moment, and then a partial retreat, though the slow surrounding corners bowed down into the flame. Darlingly, the very tip of the thin muslin caught the fire, and that small errant corner then ruined with it the rest of the white cloth--that wicked dip, a too far motion, an irretrievably loose moment--and the whole thing fell into slippery sin; at once those nimble flames hungrily devoured the curtains before jumping greedily to the canopy that lay atop that bed onto the yielding canopy, which like all those canopies, like all those whoring canopies on the old wooden beds, hund gown low and languid so as to filter light, encouraging the easy idle loll of morning, enabling prolonged comfort in the laze. The indolently shielding canopy, the loose succumbing canopy, caught the thrusting flame and took it on as it spread itself giving and complaint, supplicant and yielding, like a sinful Christian, to the fire and the flames...."

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A polyphonic portrait of a troubled family, as told by four sisters (each demonstrating a different response to and outcome of a broken home: seriousness, sorrow, anger, and brilliance), their insane mother, an aunt, a grandmother. Secrets gradually emerge into the light, or escape those who might benefit from knowing them. The end result of this family trajectory is, sadly, trauma and fragmentation, not understanding and acceptance. Understanding and acceptance comes in isolated bursts to the separate narrators: bits of memories from which they define themselves, essayistic art history readings that elevate beyond the specific, the eventual creation of ones own path through life as separated from the histories that seek to hold one back.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the most achingly beautiful books I've ever read. It's as though Pedro Almodóvar made a film about Sylvia Plath and it was cooed out so lovingly and with so much sorrow.

[Lana C. Marilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's lyrical. Very poetic. But it doesn't drag. This is a story about mothers and sisters, so you see over time how it all unfolds, how the things that one says are built upon later, by another. You get to hear the same story told from five sides, and other lavish details while others bring it up in the context of a larger point. I really loved these stories, these voices. And they're all so sad. It's a very visual novel. A very meticulous, carefully painted story.

It's never going to feel "clear", to be honest. I feel close to these girls, and I like them, but it's unclear if things will ever be better for them. And it's unclear if there is any chance that they may grown up to be happy. But it's a really good story. It's a nice change of pace to read about women of color and their homes and their struggles and families. It is all heartbreaking, and excellent at that.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

narrative of loss and madness realized in all of its fractured complexity.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, full of sorrow, and a book I can see myself returning to read again. There was so much in these pages. The novel is told from the perspective of six women in the same Mexican family. The prose is lyrical and the pieces of the story come together slowly (both these are reasons I can see myself re-reading; I know there is much I probably missed in this first read). Her command of language reminds me of Didion. I hope to find more writing by Pena, she's wonderful.

(Side note: while I was reading I felt that this book might appeal to people who enjoyed the Amazon tv series I LOVE DICK due to how there are photos of art and commentary by one of the characters, as well as the female-centric POVs. I just went to Pena's official website and realized her book has the same publisher as I Love Dick, and that author Chris Krause and her ex-husband Sylvere are featured in a couple of Pena's films.)

[Karen (idleutopia_reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will say this with great confidence, if you ever read a book I recommend please make it this one. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I loved this book. It is a lyrical story that allows each of its characters to take center stage and allow them space to share their side of the story. The story follows the past, present and hopeful future of four sisters, Rocio, Julia, Marta and Sofia, their mother, Claudia, their aunt, and grandmother, Cecilia. Men are central to their pain but not to their stories, which I found so groundbreaking. The story is haunting and there is a shadow that accompanies each of their chronicles. There were times when I condemned the storyteller, when I didn’t believe the words they were sharing or when finding out what they truly thought didn’t endear me to them. There were other times when I felt so protective of the narrator and wanted to continue to follow her but I was brought to look at another perspective. This story follows the ripple effect of a mother who allows one of her daughters to be taken away from her. Her daughter goes to live with her uncle and this tethers the already weak bond that each daughter had with their mother. A mother that had so many issues of her own to deal with, specifically an undiagnosed mental illness. This madness that follows each storyteller showcases the fragility in their childhood and how it comes to haunt their life, their search for self and their relationship with their mother. The familial relationships that were explored in this story were so amazingly well crafted. I loved exploring how each character was affected by the same events and how it went to shape the rest of their life but also how they chose to allow them to shape them.

What I love so much about this story is that each character is so complex. Allowing each character to speak their “truth” makes you realize that not everything is black and white in this story. Most importantly, and this has to be emphasized, it allows these women characters to be complex. The story is truly sad and it’s aptly named the sad passions. I was haunted and intrigued by the women in this story. The story pieces itself together to create a tapestry that will show the cracks within the beauty. To me, it felt like witnessing monologues and allowing the characters to share their stories. Finally, in culmination, it all comes together to glimpse an understanding and compassion that you may not have thought you were capable of having before. This will be a story that I will definitely come back to because I feel like I’ll uncover something new with each new reading. Ultimately, the plot of this story is a conductor that allows us to dive deeper into women and their life in a patriarchal society. One that condemns, that allows you to drown, that hurts, that pains and that pushes you to carve a freedom at many expenses. One thing I do have to add is that the Julia chapters were my favorite. She is a writer and her chapters included passages on art that flowed seamlessly in the story. There were pictures of these art pieces that were included in the story and I found so many new artists and photographers that I wanted to research after I read her passages. I keep on rambling but it’s just hard to stop praising this book.

[Monika · Rating 5 out of 5]

To refuse the notion of the word as perfect, creating stable meanings within written discourse, French philosopher Jacques Derrida established the term ‘différance’ which marks imprecision of language. The instability of language was probably a concern for Veronica Gonzalez Pena – the author of the astonishing book The Sad Passions. A polyphonic narrative set in Mexico, the book circles around the mother and her four daughters, hardly coming to terms with the mother’s mental illness and everything it entails. Different points of view are needed to spread the trope of the mother figure as lost unity. Lost paradise, in a way.

When everything collapses, mirroring and doubling for the sisters evolves into a way to carry on, although differently. Some of the sisters organize their lives anchoring them in fierce rage, some – in confusion and anguish. To convey the wide spectrum of emotions, the author exhausts the conjunction ‘and’, trying to define what’s ultimately undefinable. The textual repetition becomes a means to channel the fluid nature of life and language, though I have to add it also helps in resisting sentimentality.

On top of everything, this novel goes into art. It goes into it not because it wants to demonstrate how one can save oneself through art. It’s just that if you are about to drown, art gives you that special electricity that proceeds your urges. Seeing some visual intertexts so explicitly in the flesh of the text, I was surprised by the intertextual move that the author did. For a moment, it felt amateur-like, but just to understand then it leads to the most beautiful crescendo. The final section of the book, presenting the photography of Francesca Woodman, suggests that where the verbal fails, the visual can come in handy.

I hope more books like this will carry me through 2023 – I need their iridescent insanity for my sanity.

[The Great Dan Marino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked mixing voices, swirling motion of the novel, the recollective-with-limited-scene aspect of it; Claudia stood out, Julia's art stuff interesting; don't think there's a structure to solve--was one of the premises--but lack of design or movement or formal conceit or arc, something to really latch onto, meant it failed to lift off a bit, ended up feeling < sum of its parts. Some punctuation stuff bothered me and I wish the publisher had copyedited a bit better. Real good novel, though, might check out more from her.

[Jorge Arreola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrically beautiful exploration of how Madness dismembers a family. I found every voice to be unique and to play off each other well in the telling and retelling of important events in their lives. The chapters that ruminate on the meanings of art are particularly thought provoking and intelligently written. The author does a good job of showing us a Mexico City we don't normally see. This book deserves more recognition than it's getting in my humble opinion. Check it out.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book resembles everything that i never thought i’d speak about. how sandra was able to escape from her family’s troubles, and beat the odds with julia. in a way, i view my past self as julia, and my present as sandra. julia, being given away is painfully difficult for the girls around her, and they ultimately have to cope with the loss of something they never really knew anyways. for sandra, she was the only daughter to not grow with another s/o, have a child, etc. she only had herself & marisa is the girl i never knew i needed— the girl to push me to go, the girl that tells me the door has always been open, but it is my responsibility to walk into it, willingly. marisa, you are the voice that i never knew i needed to hear. marta, the anger that lingers within myself, and the grudge i hold towards my mother. julia, the slow acceptance of what my mother will ever amount to, yet choosing to distance for the greater good. rocio, who wonders if she’ll ever amount to a nurturing mother, with the fear of turning into her own. oh how i look into these girls and how they resemble everything i was, am, and will possibly become. i feel deeply. i feel for them. i felt for them. the raw, thoughtful, perspective that veronica has when connecting these stories with art pieces is truly unmatched. you remind me of what i have become since moving here. how deeply i feel for the small details of art. how i reflect on my mother and i’s relationship. how i view my sister, and her child. ultimately, we are the products of our mothers, and we have to want to walk away from that cycle. while i am still learning this, the sad passions that lie within myself will forever remain, and this book has helped me realize just that. veronica, u show me what womanhood could look like if i never got away, and that alone confirms that i have made the right choice.

[clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rivulets of consciousness marred by agonies of the self as produced by family. Truth and trauma co-exist as an inextricable mass of twisting serpents here, and are warped by lifelong elisions. There are echoes of Woolf's The Waves, almost. While this would have benefited from another pass at editing, the way these memories and confessions spill out benefits from a hypnotic rhythm that is raw and unfiltered.

I first came across this book at Semiotexte's table at a book fair (after having a short conversation with El Khoti about Hervé Guibert's photograph of Isabelle Adjani outside a zoo for LaCava's The Superrationals, both lending to the Semiotexte "universe") and was drawn to it partly for its inclusions of art, but felt that they fell short, to a degree, in their potential—discussions of Hans Bellmer's twisted dolls lead to his wife and artist in her own right, Unica Zern, who is only touched upon by way of her suicide. Her own life was thoroughly dominated by men to the point of suffocation. Similarly, these girls are inexorably drawn to and attract men, are marked by them both explicitly and implicitly. On the other hand, the artists touched upon are enhancing (Francesca Woodman, Robert Barry), and the photo of Michel Majerus on that lawnmower was jarring; art thrives when incorporated as autofiction first, then as lines of questioning.

All in all an absorbing read of epic proportions, one that I wish went on for another 300-odd pages. Even then it wouldn't have been enough. I'm keen to look into her other works, especially her forthcoming novel, Notes on Disappearing, this winter.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were scenes in this book that could have been shortened to one line. Trivial or inconsequential moments that added no value to the story. While reading, I couldn't help but wonder if this book was even edited. It is a long, expansive, and lyrical portrayal of a Mexican family and their erratic, even manic behaviour. Torn apart by the fragility and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. The protagonist tries to renounce and disconnect with parts of her identity that tie to her family, expect for one member...her sister. Although her emotional terror was something I felt deeply throughout reading this.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

As children, the mysterious banishment of one of the sisters fueled by the instability of their mother, leaves a generational family of women in a state of suspension. They are fractured pieces of one another with each woman grasping onto a different account of their family's memories. And yet, in their reflections we are reminded in unique ways, like through famous pieces of art, of their connection. I loved this addition and found it so transformative. Gonzales Pena's talent to understand and convey the nuance of family dynamics, the human psyche, and character development is absolutely fantastic.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written like a jigsaw puzzle, this is an incredibly astute portrait of a family twisted in the grip of bipolar disorder.
It's a story where characterization overwhelms plot, and the multiple perspectives only serve to add depth to a history where truth and objectivity is often impossible.
"..these are actual girls who, though they may seem untethered at times, are fully living too, searching, investigating, playing out the game of their lives in something which resembles the early childhood theater of taunts in gardens.
And is this not the space which art too inhabits?"

[Eric Cepela · Rating 3 out of 5]

run on sentences with too many adjectives and too much punctuation. virginia woolf's strange use of the semicolon is endearing. peña's is not.

intentionally repetitive. over the story as a whole and from sentence to sentence. a couple hundred pages of indulgence. in things like art and young, sapphic, incestuous experimentation.

3 stars

[Madeesonxoxo · Rating 3 out of 5]

“ I wept with the thought that if I did not leave Los Angeles I was going to die. The other me, whom I kept seeing everywhere, that other one would end up killing me, whether or not she knew who I was. Whether or not she knew I existed at all. “

a really beautiful book, but we def could’ve cut down on some pages

[Joanna Forde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each section written like someone sitting down in an interview (akin to The Savage Detectives) and an honest display of sister and mother-daughter relationships. Poetic and enchanting, notes on cyclical behavior, subtly revealing.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a slow start and no particularly memorable passages for me but still an enjoyable read that depicts the complications of family life when mental illness is involved.

[Full Stop]

http://www.full-stop.net/2013/08/01/r...

Review by Jesse Miller

It’s not long after she marries the flighty and seductive Miguel, as they are hitchhiking back to Mexico from Kansas City, pregnant with her first child, that Claudia begins to hear voices. If we are to take her at her word, it’s Miguel’s fault; his drawing her away from the strict but comfortable home of her childhood, flirting with other women, going off mysteriously for long stretches of time, all of it leads to her breakdown. She feels her mind starting to slip, finds herself panicking for unknown reasons, ceases to sleep, begins talking back to those voices, screaming at them.

It’s at this point that Miguel takes her to a hospital where she is treated with electroconvulsive therapy, which leaves her drooling, shocked, and temporarily pacified. At this key moment of Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions, the reader encounters the themes of force and psychiatric power that are so common in literature about madness, which often presents the medical profession in a critical light, as part of a larger process of rationality straitjacketing creativity, civilization suppressing the primitive — one might look to Septimus Smith’s suicide at the end of Mrs. Dalloway for an example. She describes the procedure: “They tied me up liquid and held me down solid and shoved something cold and hard into my mouth and then they gave me those shocks in my head.” The scene, with its barely suppressed resonances of sexual violence, the physical restraint, the mouthpiece shoved into her mouth, the husband who “watched while they did it,” would fit nicely as an example in Heroines, Kate Zambreno’s recent, innovative account of how transgressive women have been systematically repressed by psychological discourses and practices throughout our modern and contemporary (literary) history.

However, what makes The Sad Passions so fascinating as an example of fiction that deals with mental illness is that Claudia’s confrontation with a disciplinary psychiatry occurs only in this one brief encounter towards the beginning of the novel. Instead of limiting itself to uncovering the insidiousness of seemingly peaceful medicine and the violence of psychiatric labels, The Sad Passions records its own slippery diagnosis; a novel of effects, it measures Claudia’s undiagnosed or undiagnosable condition in the ways it becomes etched into the lives of her four daughters.

Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/08/01/r...

[Cindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read about 1/2 of this. The voices of a woman and her four adult daughters give a narrative of their lives as each struggles to realize who she is, and makes sense of it all in the midst of the mother's mental illness.

Interesting enough, but I kept wanting to stop because this book just wasn't quite speaking to me. I thought I'd skip ahead and read the last chapter, but where to find it? With each chapter being written by a different one of 5 persons, do I read the last 5 chapters? Oh hell, I may as well finish it all! She has intriguing photos scattered throughout which also lures me in, yet they often don't make sense. Hmmm.

If I take the time to finish it, there won't be any resolution. I just know it. There's not so much of a plot, as to try and understand their lives.

[Reet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book . . . It touched me in many ways: it made me remember the times I went to Jalisco by myself, when I was young, because of all the boys the author and her sisters and I met, and reminded me of the way I always felt all alone, like nobody cared for me and I could just disappear in that country and no one would ever care, or know, of always wondering why I felt like my mother didn't like me or want me, always trying to find my way. And then the mental illness, running through me and my family, back before there was diagnosis and antidepressants.

I was sad when I finished this book; I wanted it to go on. This book is lovely.

[Amie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Female relationships, female point of view, the luminous interiorities of women—I am always craving this done well, and in this book you get that times six. One of the most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve had this year. I feel like no one knows about this novel and that is so wrong, so many people would love it.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

review tomorrow

[Cristian Ermurache · Rating 5 out of 5]

intruziunea