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Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories
The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world.
From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl’s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother’s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.
From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl’s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother’s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 30, 2021
As a special bonus, this review even includes a home-selling tip (at bottom)!
This is a book of eight short stories by a Portuguese American author. These stories are literary gems. The author has written several novels and collections of short stories and every one has won a major prize, such as Artichokes, that won the Prairie Schooner Fiction Prize. She held a fiction-writing fellowship at Harvard for six years.
Before I give you an idea of what the stories are about, here are some passages that I think illustrate her excellent writing:
“Night in Lisbon speckles itself blue, tosses sapphires onto black cloth. The sapphires dissolve by daybreak, but the sky keeps the saturation of the gems of the night in the same way that clear water, amassed, holds blue.”
“A brain lesion gave him double vision...It amused him to watch people walking around with the ghosts of themselves stuck to their skins.”
“Tia had packed small round cheesecakes, and they were so pleasantly laced with the smell of diesel fumes that they tasted like travel.”
“Father Jaime got drunk exactly one night a week, and he did it very beautifully, falling into the sparkling glass of firewater and emerging out the other end, clarified and wounded.”
[About a mother’s photographic memorial to her deceased daughter] “We cannot change our past fate, but we can intensify it. People are quiet and graceful as they gaze at the wall. They see that they are not alone with their secret fear that time does the opposite of healing.”
“A simple typical story: the man says I love it, and the woman says I love you.”
Every story is infused with Portuguese culture, especially religion intertwined with superstition, and the poverty-stricken remembered lives of these people and their descendants in northern California who originally came from the Azores islands. I know from people I knew as a kid (in the Portuguese American community in New England) and from the book I wrote about Portuguese Americans, these were rural folks who grew up with a single pair of shoes to share when they walked to the village; dirt floors expanding to wood that lay over the half of the house that was a stable – animals below. Consider that in New England, as of 2010, 5,000 people were still living who never had a single year of school. As told in several immigrant autobiographies I have read, they were people who dreamed of food.
In Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm, a young girl watches her father, her protector, dying. He tells her how he saved himself from fear: by taking a needle and thread and making a stitch under the sleeve of a dead man’s arm at a funeral. Every night she and her parents say the rosary and her job is to get the glow-in-the-dark rosary beads out of a box at the family shrine and put them under the light. They make her kiss a saint’s fingerbone at the Catholic school she goes to. Meanwhile she’s fearful - California’s Zodiac killer is stalking the streets.
In the title story, Our Lady of the Artichokes, a young girl’s aunt creates a neighborhood sensation by taking a blowtorch and scorching an image of the Virgin Mary on the garage door. She’s hoping to stop their eviction for non-payment of rent. Their shrine consists of picture of Jesus, the Pope and John Kennedy. (In my house we didn’t have the Pope.)
In All Riptides Roar with Sand from Opposing Shores, a young girl, later a woman, writes occasional letters pouring her heart out to Sister Lucia in a convent in Portugal. The ancient Sister is the last survivor of the three children who witnessed the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1913. They have a “barometer Mary” – a statuette of the Virgin that changes color from blue to pink to forecast the weather.
The story, The Mandarin Question, begins with the lines: “I was born the day my father shot and killed my mother.” The girl is raised by an aunt who has lost her husband, her brother and now her sister, and the girl grows up with that aunt who constantly pleads, in effect, ‘don’t ever leave me, you’re all I have left.’
In “My Bones Here are Waiting for Yours,” a mother has lost a daughter. She eventually solves the mystery of how and why her daughter froze to death at a ski resort when she was supposed to have been at a swimming meet hundreds of miles away.
Lisbon Story is the longest short story in the book, almost a novella. A young American woman goes to Portugal to sell her dying father’s empty house in Lisbon. She finds an African man living there, a Portuguese refugee from Mozambique, who is dying of HIV/AIDS. Another Portuguese African man, this one a refugee from Angola, and a former lover of hers from times when she visited Lisbon, helps her work with her father to sort things out.
Truly excellent stories and writing to match.
One more helpful hint, although not in the book. Having trouble selling your house? Like my father who couldn’t sell his trailer in Florida? He bought a statue of St. Joseph, the Carpenter; had it blessed by a priest, and planted him upside down in the backyard. Did it work? Well he sold his trailer. You know I’m kidding, right? LOL. (You can buy “St. Joseph Home Seller Kits” on Amazon.)
Top photo of Five wounds Church, a Portuguese National Parish in San Jose, CA from fivewoundschurch.org
Portuguese azulejos tiles from yulia-art.com
The author from ninthletter.com
This is a book of eight short stories by a Portuguese American author. These stories are literary gems. The author has written several novels and collections of short stories and every one has won a major prize, such as Artichokes, that won the Prairie Schooner Fiction Prize. She held a fiction-writing fellowship at Harvard for six years.
Before I give you an idea of what the stories are about, here are some passages that I think illustrate her excellent writing:
“Night in Lisbon speckles itself blue, tosses sapphires onto black cloth. The sapphires dissolve by daybreak, but the sky keeps the saturation of the gems of the night in the same way that clear water, amassed, holds blue.”
“A brain lesion gave him double vision...It amused him to watch people walking around with the ghosts of themselves stuck to their skins.”
“Tia had packed small round cheesecakes, and they were so pleasantly laced with the smell of diesel fumes that they tasted like travel.”
“Father Jaime got drunk exactly one night a week, and he did it very beautifully, falling into the sparkling glass of firewater and emerging out the other end, clarified and wounded.”
[About a mother’s photographic memorial to her deceased daughter] “We cannot change our past fate, but we can intensify it. People are quiet and graceful as they gaze at the wall. They see that they are not alone with their secret fear that time does the opposite of healing.”
“A simple typical story: the man says I love it, and the woman says I love you.”
Every story is infused with Portuguese culture, especially religion intertwined with superstition, and the poverty-stricken remembered lives of these people and their descendants in northern California who originally came from the Azores islands. I know from people I knew as a kid (in the Portuguese American community in New England) and from the book I wrote about Portuguese Americans, these were rural folks who grew up with a single pair of shoes to share when they walked to the village; dirt floors expanding to wood that lay over the half of the house that was a stable – animals below. Consider that in New England, as of 2010, 5,000 people were still living who never had a single year of school. As told in several immigrant autobiographies I have read, they were people who dreamed of food.
In Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm, a young girl watches her father, her protector, dying. He tells her how he saved himself from fear: by taking a needle and thread and making a stitch under the sleeve of a dead man’s arm at a funeral. Every night she and her parents say the rosary and her job is to get the glow-in-the-dark rosary beads out of a box at the family shrine and put them under the light. They make her kiss a saint’s fingerbone at the Catholic school she goes to. Meanwhile she’s fearful - California’s Zodiac killer is stalking the streets.
In the title story, Our Lady of the Artichokes, a young girl’s aunt creates a neighborhood sensation by taking a blowtorch and scorching an image of the Virgin Mary on the garage door. She’s hoping to stop their eviction for non-payment of rent. Their shrine consists of picture of Jesus, the Pope and John Kennedy. (In my house we didn’t have the Pope.)
In All Riptides Roar with Sand from Opposing Shores, a young girl, later a woman, writes occasional letters pouring her heart out to Sister Lucia in a convent in Portugal. The ancient Sister is the last survivor of the three children who witnessed the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1913. They have a “barometer Mary” – a statuette of the Virgin that changes color from blue to pink to forecast the weather.
The story, The Mandarin Question, begins with the lines: “I was born the day my father shot and killed my mother.” The girl is raised by an aunt who has lost her husband, her brother and now her sister, and the girl grows up with that aunt who constantly pleads, in effect, ‘don’t ever leave me, you’re all I have left.’
In “My Bones Here are Waiting for Yours,” a mother has lost a daughter. She eventually solves the mystery of how and why her daughter froze to death at a ski resort when she was supposed to have been at a swimming meet hundreds of miles away.
Lisbon Story is the longest short story in the book, almost a novella. A young American woman goes to Portugal to sell her dying father’s empty house in Lisbon. She finds an African man living there, a Portuguese refugee from Mozambique, who is dying of HIV/AIDS. Another Portuguese African man, this one a refugee from Angola, and a former lover of hers from times when she visited Lisbon, helps her work with her father to sort things out.
Truly excellent stories and writing to match.
One more helpful hint, although not in the book. Having trouble selling your house? Like my father who couldn’t sell his trailer in Florida? He bought a statue of St. Joseph, the Carpenter; had it blessed by a priest, and planted him upside down in the backyard. Did it work? Well he sold his trailer. You know I’m kidding, right? LOL. (You can buy “St. Joseph Home Seller Kits” on Amazon.)
Top photo of Five wounds Church, a Portuguese National Parish in San Jose, CA from fivewoundschurch.org
Portuguese azulejos tiles from yulia-art.com
The author from ninthletter.com
February 21, 2016
This is a truly stunning collection of short stories. I'm often disappointed by current American fiction, but this was like nothing I've read. Katherine Vaz has her own unique voice--and it's definitely not the dreaded homogeneous voice of the MFA workshop--that is at once lyrical, quirky, humorous and at the same time deeply moving, and yet without a trace of mawkishness or sentimentality. I know Portugal very well, having lived there for ten years--indeed I consider it almost as much my home as the country I'm from, England--and I found Vaz's evocations of the country (some of the stories are set there) and her knowledge of the Portuguese people and the language impeccable. (Which is by no means usual, I've found, with writers who write about the country.) However, this is not some merely colorful collection. It's a book that gives the reader a view into the human heart that she might never have had before. The stories whose theme is father-daughter love are particularly moving. Not many books this serious are simultaneously so pleasurable to read. Highly recommended. I suppose I should mention that I have met the author at a conference, and we are friends on Facebook. I shall certainly be reading more of her books.
July 28, 2015
I thought this was a wonderfully written story collection. Drawn by the book title, and then the book cover, I added it to my stack of library books the other day. I'd never read anything by Katherine Vaz before. I am so pleased to have discovered her writing!
From the book jacket: "The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce."
From the book jacket: "The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce."
June 5, 2023
This is a beautifully written collection of short stories steeped in tragedy and religious mysticism. In one Isabel and Aunt Connie need a miracle to combat an rent increase-maybe a virgin sighting among the artichokes?? And then there is the 17 years of grief that become an art exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Half a wall with space reserved for many more years!
Another story finds a gambler using his ill-gotten gains for buying a cape for his daughter for the Holy Ghost Festival.
Another deals with a AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to leave an empty Lisbon apartment.
Katherine Vaz is a writer who understands her protagonists' lives, as well as the way religious beliefs can assert themselves powerfully after leaving your native soil.
Another story finds a gambler using his ill-gotten gains for buying a cape for his daughter for the Holy Ghost Festival.
Another deals with a AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to leave an empty Lisbon apartment.
Katherine Vaz is a writer who understands her protagonists' lives, as well as the way religious beliefs can assert themselves powerfully after leaving your native soil.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 3, 2020
As a Luso-American, I appreciated the little cultural elements interspersed throughout these short stories. Some stories were definitely better than others though, especially because her common themes like infidelity aren't my favorite. Even if I didn't love the content of each story, Vaz is good at telling them.
October 30, 2021
I picked up this collection, admittedly, completely on accident, and I was very pleasantly surprised.
The language is raw and very deeply impactful, I kept lingering on quotes, savouring the experience of reading.
Some stories are amazing, some are a bit empty, but the writing is wonderful. All in all, very glad I picked this one up.
The language is raw and very deeply impactful, I kept lingering on quotes, savouring the experience of reading.
Some stories are amazing, some are a bit empty, but the writing is wonderful. All in all, very glad I picked this one up.
October 12, 2018
Writing felt a bit disjointed, hard to follow, but I suspect it’s a stylistic choice.
February 25, 2012
How do I describe these stories? Although Vaz is a California native, these tales are very Portuguese.They are filled with Portuguese language and traditions, superstitions and mysticism. They’re fascinating, and some of them are downright weird. But they are so rich, the settings in California and Portugal so vivid, the people so real. The title story, “Our Lady of the Artichokes,” parodies the craziness that rises around any possible sighting of the Virgin Mary. “The Man Who was Made of Netting” takes us backstage at one of the annual Holy Ghost festas that happen wherever Portuguese-Americans congregate. “The Lisbon Story,” the longest in the book, still resonates in my heart as I think about the two dying men at the center of this tale. Katherine Vaz is one of the women I interviewed for my book, Stories Grandma Never Told. When we talked so long ago, she had just published Saudade, her first award-winning novel. She moved east to teach at Harvard and has followed that first book with Fado and Other Stories, Mariana and now this collection, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction. She told me back then that she found her voice when she started writing her Portuguese stories. It’s a voice worth hearing.
August 14, 2010
A collection of short stories. I was drawn to this title because of my Portuguese heritage. The references to California's bay area, the Azores, and other traditions brought back many stories my mom told me while growing up.
The language is fluid and haunting at times, though the meaning in these phrases often got lost in a fog of words and unidentifiable sentiment. Many metaphors/similes sounded nice but didn't quite ring true. For example: "His eyes have the wetness of clean diamonds."
Clean diamonds? I don't usually think of them as dirty, and I almost never think of diamonds as being wet. If you can get past the vague and sometimes flowery language, are interested in the experiences of women in American-Portuguese culture, than this may be a good book for you.
The language is fluid and haunting at times, though the meaning in these phrases often got lost in a fog of words and unidentifiable sentiment. Many metaphors/similes sounded nice but didn't quite ring true. For example: "His eyes have the wetness of clean diamonds."
Clean diamonds? I don't usually think of them as dirty, and I almost never think of diamonds as being wet. If you can get past the vague and sometimes flowery language, are interested in the experiences of women in American-Portuguese culture, than this may be a good book for you.
September 13, 2012
This book deserves 3.5 stars. I really enjoyed this collection of deeply poignant stories, all with a distinct Portuguese touch. The stories were written in a simple manner, filled with deep imagery. Vaz managed to create a good connection to the characters even within the brief stories. Somehow this book made me very nostalgic even though the stories' background do not reflect the culture that I grew up with. Despite my inclination towards rationality (or maybe because of it,) the sense of the divine interspersed with the somehow dramatically mundane (you'll know what I mean when you read the book) lives of the protagonists of these stories really touched a chord with me.
January 28, 2009
I enjoyed this little book of stories. I had read a review in the San Francisco paper when I was out there in Oct. Finally picked it up. A little melancholy. Only fueled my desire to go to Portugal. Now if I could only find a little book of Lithuanian stories to round out the old heritage...
February 24, 2015
No words can encompass the inherent truth found between the pages of this collection -- truth that resonates regardless of background. But, for fellow Portuguese-Americans...the ultimate saudade fills these stories.
February 4, 2009
Unique, funny, melancholy, surprising short stories.
August 26, 2010
Interesting set of short stories. Definitely outside of the range of normal books I read. I'm glad I read them, and I can recommend them, but I probably won't go back to this sort of story.
July 20, 2011
Beautiful imagery in these stories. I love the way Katherine Vaz writes.
March 24, 2015
This is a collection of short stories. Some of them were just okay, but Lisbon Story was great.
January 9, 2011
I love her writing!! And I actually know her, so this is particularly thrilling.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews