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Monday, June 29, 1998

Family torn by tragedy, revolution

BOOK REVIEW: Cuban sisters tell story of estranged family with contrasting voices

By Megan Dickerson

Daily Bruin Staff

Cuban ornithologist Ignacio Agueero is a naturalist of a forgotten breed, a once-renowned scientist who shoots rare birds to preserve them. Part learned philosopher and part taxidermist, he also clandestinely kills his young wife one humid morning in the Zapata swamp, mired in the mud and grass. More than 40 years after Ignacio's suicide, his daughters, long-estranged from one another, must deal with this man of ornithological myth and rumor and, ultimately, with each other.

Ingenue writer Cristina Garcia crafts a tale of Cuban sisterhood beyond national boundaries in "The Agueero Sisters." She takes the newly popularized approach of telling the story in several voices, weaving together a disparate pair of sisters through common life lacerations.

A family ripped apart by revolution, catastrophe, mysticism and other "typical" family disturbances comes alive through the spirited, revolutionary tongue of Reina Agueero; the precise, halting phrasing of her defected sister Constancia; and the first-person near-confessant tone of their long-dead father.

The novel's strengths lie in its colorful symbolism, emphasized by the flora and fauna of Cuba. "The Agueero Sisters" resonates a tone of rich ethnicity and place; its imagery sometimes seems haphazard but reinforces the state of decay imposed by the Cuban revolution.

A siguapa stygian owl, the unofficial Cuban pilcher of souls, steals through the window as Ignacio's mother gives birth on Cuban Independence Day in 1904. The earless owl, also said to deprive infants of their hearing, grabs Ignacio's discarded placenta in its beak and flies low over a concurrent parade, "scattering the crowd and raining birthing blood."

This is not the end of the bird imagery. Throughout the novel, other walks of natural life appear at opportune or inopportune moments. Tree ducks save Ignacio's father's life, a deceased family of bats shows up in a vat of cold cream Constancia sells in America and violets surface when death is imminent.

By balancing the rampant native imagery that might cause one to cubbyhole the novel as an ethnic romp with universal ideals, Garcia has created a book of cross-cultural resonance, a story more about sisterhood, daughterhood and what it means to be part of a family rather than what it means to be Latin American.

She contrasts the polar opposites Reina and Constancia to the point at which their similarities superimpose their differences - a difficult coup since she has, from the get-go, set them up to be so different.

Reina is 6-feet tall, dark-haired and irresistible to both Cuban and American men; Constancia is petite, light-skinned and anal retentive. Reina is the idealistic spirit of the revolution, a fearless electrician who spurns money; Constancia is a transplanted Miami capitalist, vending blue-bottled beauty products branded with the face of their dead mother.

Garcia's deft literary piloting across these gaps, embargoed boundaries and layers of familial mistrust manage to escape fabricating a forced fairy tale ending or waxing political on the state of events in modern-day Cuba. She succeeds in contrasting not only sisterhood, but what it means to be American, Cuban and, perhaps, a synthesis of the two.

While critics tout "The Agueero Sisters" as the type of novel that will renew American fiction, in many ways it seems to be playing business as usual. The changing voice seems more than reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver's "Pigs in Heaven," a 1993 novel told in the tongues of an ethnic father and daughter. Yet "The Agueero Sisters" fails to attain the folklorish tone of other novels in the ethnic genre.

Nevertheless, Garcia brings to the page cultural resonance and heartbreak, passion in the face of deterring reality. Whether one begins to deeply care for the characters is another matter.

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