A fiery, accomplished literary debut, Loosing My Espanish chronicles the struggles and vicissitudes of the men and women of a tiny Cuban-American community in Chicago who are haunted by history, memory, and myth as they encounter the American dream. Óscar Delossantos has recently been dismissed for a perceived indiscretion from the Jesuit boys’ high school where he has taught for twenty-two years. As his last semester comes to an end, he gives a daring, extended final history lesson: a kaleidoscopic portrait of Cuba as it exists in the hearts and minds of its exiled and dispossessed.
In Óscar’s tale, the weather is a system of extremes; a boy disappears through a hole in the ice; a tender love story unfolds; a murder of crows wreaks havoc; an old woman at the onset of Alzheimer’s burns down her house; sex, religion, family lore, gossip, and both official and reconfigured history all play their part. Throughout Óscar’s raw, sometimes hallucinatory, lyrical testament– at once heartbreaking and ennobling–he reveals not only the shape and substance of his own life, but also the hard, vital, vivid life of his entire community.
Thematically ambitious, linguistically inventive, at once visceral and refined, Loosing My Espanish announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American fiction.
In Óscar’s tale, the weather is a system of extremes; a boy disappears through a hole in the ice; a tender love story unfolds; a murder of crows wreaks havoc; an old woman at the onset of Alzheimer’s burns down her house; sex, religion, family lore, gossip, and both official and reconfigured history all play their part. Throughout Óscar’s raw, sometimes hallucinatory, lyrical testament– at once heartbreaking and ennobling–he reveals not only the shape and substance of his own life, but also the hard, vital, vivid life of his entire community.
Thematically ambitious, linguistically inventive, at once visceral and refined, Loosing My Espanish announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American fiction.
