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Yo-Yo Boing!
This iconic Spanglish novel by the leading Hispanic-American poet Giannina Braschi was heralded by the New York Daily News as "an in your face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture in the U.S." Jean Franco of Columbia University praised Braschi for her "extraordinary virtuosity, her command of many different registers, her dizzying ability to switch between English and Spanish. It is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and every day life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.
205 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1998
27 people are currently reading
770 people want to read
About the author
Giannina Braschi
16 books40 followersGiannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! (1998), the postmodern poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994), and the explosive new work of philosophical fiction United States of Banana, (Amazon Crossing, 2011), which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States.
"For decades, Dominican and Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution," noted The Boston Globe, and "Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel YO-YO BOING!, testify to it."
Her work has been described as a "synergetic fusion that marks in a determinant fashion the lived experiences of U. S. Hispanics."Written in three languages, English, Spanglish, and Spanish, Braschi's work captures the cultural experience of nearly 50 million Hispanic Americans and also seeks to explore the three political options of Puerto Rico: Nation, Colony, or Statehood.
On the subject of the Island's lack of sovereignty, Braschi stated, "Liberty is not an option (to be voted upon)—it is a human right."
"For decades, Dominican and Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution," noted The Boston Globe, and "Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel YO-YO BOING!, testify to it."
Her work has been described as a "synergetic fusion that marks in a determinant fashion the lived experiences of U. S. Hispanics."Written in three languages, English, Spanglish, and Spanish, Braschi's work captures the cultural experience of nearly 50 million Hispanic Americans and also seeks to explore the three political options of Puerto Rico: Nation, Colony, or Statehood.
On the subject of the Island's lack of sovereignty, Braschi stated, "Liberty is not an option (to be voted upon)—it is a human right."
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 30, 2018
The first bit me pareció disgusting, some sort of description of pus o algo así. So I skipped una buena parte, un mecanismo I resorted to quite often al leer este libro. No, it didn't keep my interest all along, pero el code-switching ayudó a pick up mi interés cada time it flagged.
Some bits were muy poetic and while it felt more like an essay than a novel at times, with the characters rambling on about teorías estética and de identidad, there were a few narrive threads running por debajo.
Very experimental and daring for the time, me imagino. While it clearly limits you audience to write like this, Braschi curiously dice que ocurre lo contrario. Esperemos que tenga algo de razón y que más people start writing like this. Viva el Spanglish!
Some bits were muy poetic and while it felt more like an essay than a novel at times, with the characters rambling on about teorías estética and de identidad, there were a few narrive threads running por debajo.
Very experimental and daring for the time, me imagino. While it clearly limits you audience to write like this, Braschi curiously dice que ocurre lo contrario. Esperemos que tenga algo de razón y que más people start writing like this. Viva el Spanglish!
July 8, 2012
An important book to read for any writer dealing with the question of bilingualism in her work. For this one, you will definitely need to know Spanish to fully experience the beauty and genius of Ms. Braschi's work. She's wise and playful. Imaginative and willing to take you to places that make you uncomfortable. Her words would make Joyce blush. I highly recommend reading this one. And if you can't read Spanish, learn it. Reading Braschi will freaking blow your mind.
April 10, 2009
I read this in college for a Spanish Lit class and loved it. Wrote a thesis on it. This book is creative/captivating and truly embodies the identity/culture struggles that bi-lingual/bi-cultural individuals face in America.
June 27, 2020
Quoting a philosphy professor..."Giannina Braschi posessess one of the most original voices raised within Latino letters… Daring, novel, and likely to change the character of poetic discourse. No other writer has captured the mesh and flow of this new brand of American bilingualism with such passion, wit, and intensity….Yo-Yo Boing! is ideally situated to become a modern classic. Given its sophisticated play with languages, its unusual structure, and the poet’s dialectic voice, the piece challenges the boundaries set by cultural differences and calls for a cross cultural vision of human experience...Yo-Yo Boing! is especially important and timely given the controversial rise of bilingualism across America and the work’s ability to situate itself amidst millennial angst." (Anne Freire, Professor, Colgate and Rutgers Universities)
This is the monolingual version for English language readers. *****
This is the monolingual version for English language readers. *****
June 22, 2020
"Inspiration is like death. You don’t call death. Death calls you."
"Don’t get me wrong. A thinker thought, maybe it was Ortega y Gasset, that a country is in decadence when the parts no longer want to be part of the totality. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Spain, it will happen in the States."
"We can’t be ambassadors because we don’t have a country. Puerto Rico is not a country with any power in the world, I won’t be considered a great poet. Spain created great poets with its empire and made them known around the world through its empire. Great poetry has always stemmed from the economic prosperity of a people. That is why we have Quevedo and Gongora."
Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing is an experimental literary kaleidoscope roving the landscape of personal, political, and professional philosophies related to the author’s Puerto Rican identity and written in several forms: back-and-forth dialogue, poetry, essayistic. Its main story is bookended by 3 (1 in front, 2 in back plus a play-like structured epilogue) mostly unbroken thoughts related to feminine identity, the madness of heartbreak, social upheaval both in present and the past in relation to other Hispanic and European writers, poetry in the landscape of the impending millennium, and other thoughts leading to a sort of plea going into the 21st century for personal agency and freedom against what I imagine to be the US-ization of thought currently being globalized. Through it all Braschi maintains a sort of comedic edge.
The main thrust of the book (approximately 200 pages) consists of a simple back and forth between unnamed characters that cover the simple homelife activities between a couple, spilling over into a meal between said couple that later then spills into (what I thought was) a party among friends that get into how writers deal with their own success (or lack thereof) and that of their peers, with just enough context that sort of led me to believe that Braschi’s biographical voice is the one constant throughout its pages. The point isn’t so much to track who’s speaking at any given moment – contextual clue will help you fill that in every now and again – but rather to engage with the ideas being explored from the aforementioned themes listed above.
From thoughts about gender roles in a relationship, to domineering western attitudes affecting the lives of minorities in NYC, to professional considerations regarding literary success (and even the publishing of the very book you’re reading and how it’s translation/translator participates in that very messiness); the book shifts seamlessly through its topics without so much regard for a chapter transition (aside from the opening and closing pieces), merely denoting each speaker with a indented hyphen that denotes when someone new is talking (or italics and double indentation if the thought comes from a memory of a prior conversation).
I can see readers getting thrown off the track in trying to make sense of the conundrums listed above, but I think once you settle in and relax over which voice belongs to whom the reader can start to get a sense of how to categorize those thoughts and who’s speaking them.
The closing chapter, Canned Sardines, is like a call to action, a clarion call that hit home (since I, like others, are enveloped in that very idea of a canned sardine both living in NYC and working an office job):
"You’ve been conditioned to act like a sardine—you think your canned existence is your sole existence—and you can’t tell yourself apart from the other sardines that oppress you because you’re all stuck together in one big clump—to save space—canned space—like canned time on the job—whoever works the hardest the fastest earns the most—whoever puts himself under the greatest pressure has the greatest talent to be put down—the more they put you down, the more you let them…"
Whew!
"Don’t get me wrong. A thinker thought, maybe it was Ortega y Gasset, that a country is in decadence when the parts no longer want to be part of the totality. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Spain, it will happen in the States."
"We can’t be ambassadors because we don’t have a country. Puerto Rico is not a country with any power in the world, I won’t be considered a great poet. Spain created great poets with its empire and made them known around the world through its empire. Great poetry has always stemmed from the economic prosperity of a people. That is why we have Quevedo and Gongora."
Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing is an experimental literary kaleidoscope roving the landscape of personal, political, and professional philosophies related to the author’s Puerto Rican identity and written in several forms: back-and-forth dialogue, poetry, essayistic. Its main story is bookended by 3 (1 in front, 2 in back plus a play-like structured epilogue) mostly unbroken thoughts related to feminine identity, the madness of heartbreak, social upheaval both in present and the past in relation to other Hispanic and European writers, poetry in the landscape of the impending millennium, and other thoughts leading to a sort of plea going into the 21st century for personal agency and freedom against what I imagine to be the US-ization of thought currently being globalized. Through it all Braschi maintains a sort of comedic edge.
The main thrust of the book (approximately 200 pages) consists of a simple back and forth between unnamed characters that cover the simple homelife activities between a couple, spilling over into a meal between said couple that later then spills into (what I thought was) a party among friends that get into how writers deal with their own success (or lack thereof) and that of their peers, with just enough context that sort of led me to believe that Braschi’s biographical voice is the one constant throughout its pages. The point isn’t so much to track who’s speaking at any given moment – contextual clue will help you fill that in every now and again – but rather to engage with the ideas being explored from the aforementioned themes listed above.
From thoughts about gender roles in a relationship, to domineering western attitudes affecting the lives of minorities in NYC, to professional considerations regarding literary success (and even the publishing of the very book you’re reading and how it’s translation/translator participates in that very messiness); the book shifts seamlessly through its topics without so much regard for a chapter transition (aside from the opening and closing pieces), merely denoting each speaker with a indented hyphen that denotes when someone new is talking (or italics and double indentation if the thought comes from a memory of a prior conversation).
I can see readers getting thrown off the track in trying to make sense of the conundrums listed above, but I think once you settle in and relax over which voice belongs to whom the reader can start to get a sense of how to categorize those thoughts and who’s speaking them.
The closing chapter, Canned Sardines, is like a call to action, a clarion call that hit home (since I, like others, are enveloped in that very idea of a canned sardine both living in NYC and working an office job):
"You’ve been conditioned to act like a sardine—you think your canned existence is your sole existence—and you can’t tell yourself apart from the other sardines that oppress you because you’re all stuck together in one big clump—to save space—canned space—like canned time on the job—whoever works the hardest the fastest earns the most—whoever puts himself under the greatest pressure has the greatest talent to be put down—the more they put you down, the more you let them…"
Whew!
February 2, 2024
This was an incredibly innovative and fresh book. I especially LOVED the prose sections at the beginning and at the end, they were absolutely beautiful. I enjoyed the sense of physical sensation, body and animality which often gets lost in explorations of interiority or identity. I read it for my course and I am really excited to get into analysis a bit, it will probably enrich my understanding a lot.
Some of the dialogue went over my head for sure, which is probably the point? My main critique is that it was probably too confusing, I would have preferred to keep the same two voices throughout the whole book rather than mixing many different characters. Nevertheless I highly recommend, it really should be a modern classic.
Some of the dialogue went over my head for sure, which is probably the point? My main critique is that it was probably too confusing, I would have preferred to keep the same two voices throughout the whole book rather than mixing many different characters. Nevertheless I highly recommend, it really should be a modern classic.
January 27, 2022
Entertaining and thought provoking, but hard to describe!
¨ – A lifetime work in progress. It’s a terrifying concept. You would be amazed how many times I thought I was finishing it, when another idea struck my head another thunderstorm hit, y otros pedazos caían en el saco sin fondo, y se formaban nuevas geometrias, nuevos cuadrados, otros quartos que aparecían, y que yo tenia que decorar.
– A quarter to the left, first panel, a quarter to the left, second panel, a quarter to the left, third panel, a quarter to the left, fourth panel. And then, all of them, at the same time, a quarter to the right. And there you have it: musical fugue.¨ (loc. 3146)
¨ – A lifetime work in progress. It’s a terrifying concept. You would be amazed how many times I thought I was finishing it, when another idea struck my head another thunderstorm hit, y otros pedazos caían en el saco sin fondo, y se formaban nuevas geometrias, nuevos cuadrados, otros quartos que aparecían, y que yo tenia que decorar.
– A quarter to the left, first panel, a quarter to the left, second panel, a quarter to the left, third panel, a quarter to the left, fourth panel. And then, all of them, at the same time, a quarter to the right. And there you have it: musical fugue.¨ (loc. 3146)
July 22, 2019
Gianinna Brashchi escribe con indudable talento pero por momentos el libro se torna bastane aburrido, just to have the prose attract your attention again at later times.
Lo que me gusta de este libro: its wild literary aesthetic, the fact that she doesn't have to ask permision para ser bilingüe y escribir bilingüe--I find this inspiring.
What I did not like: too introspective at times y otras veces hasta un poco pedante.
Lo que me gusta de este libro: its wild literary aesthetic, the fact that she doesn't have to ask permision para ser bilingüe y escribir bilingüe--I find this inspiring.
What I did not like: too introspective at times y otras veces hasta un poco pedante.
April 28, 2016
This book sucks. It doesn't even deserve a bright argument about why it sucks. La Braschi esta se ríe en nuestra puta cara. Bazofia.
November 11, 2017
I don’t think this is a book for everybody. It’s quite experimental, and lacks narrative (which I think is one of the author’s main points). It’s an exploration of The Spanish, English and Spanglish languages in one book. At times it feels like a play, and at times poetry. It is enjoyable in many parts (specially if you recognize her play with words, imagery and cultural references), but in other parts it’s quite dislocating. It’s a writer’s manifesto and social/cultural criticism qt the same time.
April 21, 2021
Even google translate (please don’t judge) couldn’t obscure the beautifully unhindered poetry in this exhilarating speeding train of an extended conversation on art, politics, philosophy, pop culture, low brow humor, and pretty much everything else. The beauty and uniqueness of the language is the point, and that is enough.
September 6, 2020
¿Dadá? Super dadá. El formato y el lenguaje exquisitios, pero aún me cuestiono qué leí 😅
November 7, 2011
This cutting-edge novel has a biting sense of humor, a violent temper, and a sophisticated urban sensibility. Stark, gritty language brings to life the daily struggles of the down-n-out as well as the up-n-coming. It's not a plot-based conventional novel but rather a musical literary experience. Giannina Braschi is often referred to as an important contemporary Latin American writer, but she has little to do with Marquez, Allende, and Vargas Llosa. She is much more akin to the American beats like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Yo-Yo Boing! portrays a new generation of bohemian hedonists who celebrate non-conformity and creativity. I love this book.
September 1, 2015
Yo-Yo Boing! is a series of conversations with no beginning and no ending, on as various topics as metafiction, art, immigration, discrimination, multiculturalism, language, dreams, censorship, food, war and so on. When you realize you need to stop trying to name and genderise the voices, and you free yourself of all conventions, you can read the novel as a flow of thoughts that highlight the condition of humanity in contemporary society. If interested, read more on my personal blog http://dealulcudor.blogspot.ro/2015/0...
April 24, 2024
“Why didn’t you? // I was mature enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. Although it’s true, I never wrote another verse. // Then your desire was not genuine. // Then you were not going to be a critic. Nobody breaks what people are. They can hurt your feelings, yes. Verlaine broke Rimbaud’s heart, but nurtured his poetry by unleashing his emotions. He made him despise poetry by unleashing his emotions. // He made him despise poetry. // He broke his heart, not his art.”
March 30, 2013
This book was written primarily in Spanglish, with sentences intermingling both Spanish and English. It took me awhile to really get back into my Spanish world, but once I did, the book opened up. I love the discussion of artists and poets and the like struggling to come to terms with their American identities despite Latin roots.
July 12, 2012
A fascinating, enjoyable book despite its dumb title. See my review at danielshankcruz.com.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews