by H. G. Carrillo (Author)
A heartbreaking, funny, and brilliantly inventive novel with "a narrator who erupts and disrupts the pavements of the Cuban-American experience by showing us that the most accurate, if not truthful, fact comes from the memory of the impassioned heart." --Helena María Viramontes, author of Under the Feet of Jesus
"A novel that exists in a realm where beauty and memory and longing are one." --Junot Díaz, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize- winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Delossantos is about to lose his job as a teacher at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. Rather than go quietly, he embarks on a valiant last history lesson that chronicles the flight from Cuba of his makeshift extended family. Evoking the struggle between nostalgia and the realities of the Cuban Revolution with both grit and lyricism, he inspires his students with an altogether dazzling reinterpretation of the Cuban-American experience.
Front Jacket
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. Oscar 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 Oscar'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 Oscar'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.
"From the Hardcover edition.
Author Biography
H. G. CARRILLOS's work appeared in The Kenyon Review and Glimmer Train, among other journals and magazines. He was an associate professor at George Washington University. He died in 2020.