Fragments of experience

• Book: The House on Mango Street
• Location: Chicago
• Author: Sandra Cisneros

Review Author: Vasha

It took me a while to read this book even though it’s very short because it’s made up of vignettes without much of a connecting thread. The author is a poet, and I think it shows; this really isn’t a novel. There is a central character Esperanza, who herself is developing into a poet; sometimes the narrative voice is that of a teenage girl, but some of the vignettes are elaborately poetic, which can be a disconcerting shift of tone. The glimpses of life in Chicago are sometimes vivid, sometimes feel vague or unreal. The most problematic aspect is that characters and incidents are introduced then dropped without further mention, disrupting a sense of development of the protagonist—in fact, it’s sometimes hard to believe all these things are happening to the same person. To take one example, in one chapter an aunt (never mentioned again) gets Esperanza a job at a photo-processing shop. Esperanza attends her first day of work and is very shy around the other employees. But one man is friendly and she starts to think this might not be too bad, but then he grabs her and kisses her on the mouth and won’t let go. End of story. We aren’t told what happened after, if she continued to work at the photo shop, if she got some other job… This incident, like most others in the book, might as well not have happened for all it’s ever alluded to again. So, as a collection of vignettes or prose poems that might not all have happened to the same person, this sort of works, but not as a novel. I don’t mean to say it’s a bad book, though; it was well worth reading. The author does often have a gift for choosing the right language, the right details, to bring a scene to life.

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