Review by Choice Review
Vazquez takes his title from a Dona Soldano poem, which reads: "The importance of butterflies has to do with their offspring growing through the ugly and always flying away beautiful." The text consists of 17 short, vividly rendered vignettes that succeed better as short stories than as chapters of a novel. Poignant depictions of a young Chicano man's childhood and adolescence in El Paso center around abandonment by his parents and his upbringing in an extended family headed by his loving grandmother. The boy, "Buzzy," reminisces about working at his Abuelita's food stall in the mercado, the "birdcage" house full of a colorful cast of stray relatives and children, his erotic explorations with his cousin in the attic, and the grim war that sends young men home in their coffins. Vazquez renders the dreams and anxieties of his young protagonist with a sensitivity and compassion. The author's attempt to frame the stories from a voice of a "dead" man, dehumanized by the Vietnamese war experience, however, does little more than gain the reader's brief attention as nonconventional. The "minimalist" portraits of Buzzy's coming of age, however, are memorable and skillfully crafted. All collections. D. R. Stoddard; Anne Arundel Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
"This is my first day of being dead." So opens a narrative that dwells in a dimension of time and memory beyond classic realism, with echoes of Fuentes and Marquez. Told in a prose that frequently intertwines Spanish and English, this novel is structured as a series of memories, vignettes of the narrator's life, told from inside a coffin on a plane returning from Vietnam. It is a kind of elegy, not just for the narrator's lost life at age 18 (and figuratively, earlier, to heroin) but also for those he has lost: his mother, who moved away when he was six; his absent father; his grandmother, Nana Kika; his friend Chuey, a champion of poetry; and his cousin Red, who writes on the side and whom he loves. These rich memories, despite their abrupt curtailment, are Vazquez's noteworthy monument to a threatened but resilient cultural potential. --Jim O'Laughlin
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Buzzy Digit, a dead Chicano soldier returning from Vietnam in a coffin at the age of 18, narrates Vasquez's uneven first novel, a dark and disquieting account of growing up in the El Paso barrio in the late 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by his parents, raised by his Abuelita (grandmother), Buzzy grows up a closet sissy in an environment rife with death, incest, whoring, rape and drug use before jumping a train out of El Paso at age 13 and enlisting in the Army. Struggling to find his own place amid his extended family and the desperation of his surroundings, Buzzy speaks in a language that is forceful but fragmented, energetically bilingual and laced with dreamy images of the sex and the squalor that permeate his world. But Buzzy doesn't moralize about his circumstances, choosing to offset harsh and unhappy memories with comic scenes of playing Little League baseball, sexual romps with his cousin Rosemary and rhapsodic expressions of his own despair and estrangement ("I was weeping in the quilted night when I sinned with thousands of sinners, breaking our flesh against the stars"). Buzzy's is an episodic, often slapdash story, lacking the focus and refinement that a practiced novelist would bring to it. Yet Vasquez, whose poetry has been anthologized in books like New Chicana/Chicano Writing, exhibits a voice that is singular, tragic and offers a fresh take on a tumultuous and destitute boyhood in the borderlands of southwest Texas. Foreign rights sold in Italy, France and the Netherlands. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In the prolog, Vásquez reveals that his young narrator, Buzzy, is already dead, having been killed in Vietnam. Then, in a fresh, impressionistic style, he lets Buzzy recount his childhood memories of growing up in El Paso. Abandoned by his father and then his mother, Buzzy is raised in a house full of cousins. Much of the novel portrays his encounter with life's underside: drug dealing, child molestation, prostitution, predatory homosexuals, and sex with close relatives, if not actual incest. Though the telling is fragmented, Vásquez shows his skill when he settles down and focuses on an event. For example, Buzzy's chance meeting with President Kennedy just prior to his trip to Dallas stands as a cohesive short story. This first novel from a promising Chicano writer is recommended for large fiction and modern Hispanic literature collections.Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Life in the Chicano community of El Paso during the 1960s, remembered by a boy soldier killed in Vietnam as he waits in his coffin to be flown home, provides the gist and the twist of Vázquez's brash first novel. Abandoned by his parents, raised by his father's mother, the hard-working family matriarch Nana Kika, Bernadino Dysyadachek (a.k.a. Buzzy Digit) has a lot to remember, much of it troubling. He remembers his mother, after taking his sisters away with her to follow her lover, promising to visit but never coming back; he remembers being molested by a drunken baker when sent by Nana Kika to get tamales for her stall in the street market; he remembers being disgraced in Little League when panic turned his red-hot bat in practice into one that could never find the ball; he remembers his cousin Red, who was already not a virgin when an uncle began abusing her, and who became his closest confidant. Buzzy shared many things with Red--secrets, sex, his dreams--but their closeness can't keep the world away. When relatives and neighbors go off to Vietnam, coming home one by one for burial, the shock runs deep. Having dropped out of school, and keen to be a hero for his family, underage Buzzy joins the army despite Red's efforts. Beloved Nana Kika dies while he's on a secret mission in the jungle, and even though he survives that tour of duty, becoming cocky enough in letters to Red to imagine his life after Vietnam, his fate proves no different than that of so many others from the barrio. Quirky, lyrical, kaleidoscopic, and supercharged with a choice assortment of sexual adventures (even JFK passes through El Paso, lingering long enough to philander), Vázquez's debut fiction has many fine touches, but its impact is diluted by a narrative structure too weak to unify the tale's rapidly shifting impressions and moods.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
