{"product_id":"the-sad-passions-isbn-9781584351207","title":"The Sad Passions","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe lyrical story of a Mexican family torn apart by the fragility and madness of one of its members.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eTold by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Pena's \u003ci\u003eThe Sad Passions\u003c\/i\u003e captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, \u003ci\u003eThe Sad Passions \u003c\/i\u003eis the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is 1960, and the wild and impulsive sixteen-year-old Claudia elopes from her comfortable family home in Mexico City with Miguel, a seductive drifter who will remain her wandering husband for the next twenty years. Hitchhiking across the United States with Miguel, sometimes spending the night in jails, Claudia stops sleeping and begins seeing visions. Abandoned at a small clinic in Texas, she receives electroshock treatment while seven months pregnant with her first daughter. Afterward, Miguel leaves her, dumb and drooling, at her mother's doorstep.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLiving more often at her mother's home than with Miguel, Claudia will give birth to four girls. But when Julia, her second daughter, is inexplicably given away to a distant relation in Los Angeles, Claudia's fragile, uncertain state comes to affect everyone around her. Julia's disappearance—which could symbolize the destabilizing effect of manic depression—will become the organizing myth in all of the daughters' unsettled lives; for if one can disappear, why not all of them?\u003c\/p\u003eFor all of the effects of erasure and absence on \u003ci\u003eThe Sad Passions\u003c\/i\u003e, the narration is incredibly present, crawling on the page in spidery, sprawling observations, setting up pools and lairs that lure a reader in.—\u003cb\u003eMargaret Wappler\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Sad Passions\u003c\/i\u003e, Veronica Gonzalez Peña's extraordinary novel of desire, loss, and matrilineal history, explodes the teenage pregnancy script through its unflinching plumbing of the bond between mother and daughter. \u003ci\u003eThe Sad Passions\u003c\/i\u003e begins with a story we think we know, and then shows us how little any of us understand: about our ancestors, our parents, ourselves.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eLisa Locascio\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn exquisite and moving panorama of late 20th century life in Mexico and the US.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eGeorge Porcari\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Literary Review\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eI like the way the [cover] image moves with this novel, the way the absence becomes the presence. Veronica Gonzalez Peña does not write absence as a form of lack, her absence froths and grows agitated, it fills up the page with pulsing need.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eSaehee Cho\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHTML Giant\u003c\/i\u003e—Veronica Gonzalez Pena is the author of \u003ci\u003etwin time: or, how death befell me\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize in 2007. She is also the founder of rockypoint Press, which produces a series of artist-writer collaborations.","brand":"Semiotext(e)","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299966013669,"sku":"NP9781584351207","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781584351207.jpg?v=1767741312","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-sad-passions-isbn-9781584351207","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}