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Passion and Revolution
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11019 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
1,984 Words |
| Author
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Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier
Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier is professor of Spanish and Latin
American literature at St. John's University in Jamaica, New
York. She is the author of Interviews With Spanish Writers
(Dalkey Archieve Presss, 1991), Interviews With Latin
American
Writers (Kalkey Archive press, 1989), and Gabriela Mistral,
the Teacher From the Valley of Elqui (Franciscan Herald
press,
1974, originally published in 1973 by Editorial Crespillo in
Buenos Aires as Gabriela Mistral, la maestra de Elqui). She
is coauthor with Zenaida Gutierrez-Vega of the book Carmen
Conde de viva voz (Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1992). |
TINISIMA
Elena Poniatowska
Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1992
663 pp.
Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico's foremost journalists and novelists, has a fascinating, cosmopolitan background. Born in Paris, she is the descendant of a prominent family that included Prince Poniatowski, marshal of France under Napoleon, and Stanislaw August, the last king of Poland, on her father's side, and, on her mother's side, a family of reactionary Mexican landowners who resided in Paris. Her paternal grandfather was André Poniatowski, a writer who, among other things, founded the Pacific Sierra Railway in San Francisco. Her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Sperry Crocker, was an American whose ancestors established the Crocker Museum in San Francisco.
Poniatowska's father fought under General de Gaulle in World War II. Her mother, Paula Amor, to whom her latest book, Tinisima, is dedicated, is Mexican, although she was born in Paris and speaks French more fluently than Spanish. An elegant and graceful woman, Amor was in her youth a model for the designer Schiaparelli, and her pictures often appeared in Vogue.
When she moved to Mexico with her family at the end of the Second World War, young Elena enthusiastically embraced her mother's homeland, eager to absorb its culture and language. She immersed herself in colloquial Spanish, learning the language the servants spoke to her, the expressions she overheard on the street, unconsciously identifying with the common people. Little did she know then that she would become one of Mexico's spokeswomen and that her writings would come to represent the voice of the people. Mexico, as she has said to me on many occasions, is a country she chose to love and never to leave.
The author of many books, Poniatowska has created a bridge between fiction and nonfiction. She often takes the characters for her novels from real life and lends them her voice to express what they cannot or know not how to say. Among her works are the following: Hasta no verte Jesus mio (1969; published as Until We Meet Again by Pantheon in 1987); La noche de Tiatelolco: testimonios de historia oral (1971; published as Massacre in Mexico by Viking in 1975); and Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978; published as Dear Diego by Pantheon in 1986).
A passionate woman
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