Thirteen Senses Ebook

Thirteen Senses Ebook

A daring essay of love, magic, adventure, and miracles, Victor Villaseñor’s Thirteen Senses proceeds the exhilarating family saga that started out in the widely acclaimed bestseller Rain of Gold, delivering a stunning story of passion, family, and the forgotten mystical senses that stir within us all.

Thirteen Senses begins with the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the aging former bootlegger Salvador and his graceful wife, Lupe. When asked by a young priest to repeat the sacred ceremonial phrase “to honor and obey,” Lupe surprises herself and says. “No, I will not say ‘obey’. How dare you! You don’t talk to me like this after fifty years of marriage and I now knowing what I know!” After the hilarious shock of Lupe’s rejection of the ceremony, the Villaseñor family is forced to thoroughly examine the love that Lupe and Salvador have shared for so some years — a universal, gut-honest love that will in the long run energize and inspire the couple into old age.

Consider, he proceeds in this unforgettable portrait of Latino family life, the case of his grandparents, who fled from civil-war-torn Mexico to the United States in 1910. As they traveled north, his father told Villaseñor, “Cannons were blasting. People were screaming and dying. The creeks ran red with blood.” But Villaseñor’s grandmother’s stories in regards to “the stars, the moon, the she-fox” kept the children’s minds off the terrors around them, guiding them to their new homeland and shaping family history. That history provides the grist for Villaseñor’s exuberantly spinning mill, yielding a sprawling narrative shot through with touches of magical realism and homespun philosophy, and tinged now and then with regret–as when, for instance, Villaseñor’s mother confesses, “I miss your father so much … but I’m the one who could never fetch myself to tell him that I loved him.”

But sorrow is rare and humor plenteous as Villaseñor affectionately recounts his relatives’ travails and improbable dreams, a heap of of which, like a grandfather’s quest for gold in a concealed Mexican canyon, come true. As he writes, Villaseñor underscores the importance of tradition, faith, forgiveness, and, yes, good stories in making life livable, and this good story will please a great deal of readers. –Gregory McNamee

From Publishers WeeklyFans of Villasenor’s admirable family epic, Rain of Gold (Arte Publico, 1991) will be hard-pressed to wade through this massive, workmanlike sequel. The book’s humorous opening at the 50th-anniversary renewal of Villasenor’s parents’ wedding vows, the “bride” refuses to say “obey” as her sister catcalls from the front pew with regards to the groom’s unreliability gives way to a series of simplistic feminist diatribes followed by a nasty family squabble. The author then tracks his mother and father, Lupe and Salvador, through the passionate and turbulent original years of their marriage, always shadowed by Salvador’s bootlegging and deceit, always redeemed by Lupe’s fiery strength, her bottom-line mutual sense and a hearty helping of sex. Lupe follows Salvador around Mexico on his criminal and other exploits before putting her foot down; the book leaves them at the begin of a presumably lawful, comparatively calm life in California. Though the author espouses feminist views, his female characters are one-dimensional, axiom-spouting cultural stereotypes: suffering, saintly and bitter. Where the earlier book offered an enjoyable, unreconstructed representation of early 20th-century rural Mexican culture, here that culture has been infected by a feel-good mysticism that even the California setting doesn’t excuse. The story meanders through linguistic anachronisms (no man in 1929 would have said “full Latina hips”), mixed metaphors, aimless digressions, innumerable exclamation marks and warmed-over New Age imagery like “The Father Sun was now gone, and the Mother Moon was coming up, and the Child Earth was cooling.” The author’s central question when it comes to his parents’ kinship “Was it love?” brings a neat if superficial unity to the narrative. 8 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library JournalThis is a fascinating, if problematic, account of the early married life of the author’s parents, a young Mexican American couple living in California and coping with the economic and social effects of the Great Depression. Continuing the family saga he begun in Rain of Gold, Villase?or tells of his father, Salvador, an exceedingly moral man who, paradoxically, bootlegs liquor to earn a living. His young bride, Lupe, who is finelooking and intellectual but likewise traditionalisti and na?ve, is held ignorant of Salvador’s livelihood until she is pregnant with their primary child a dilemma the reader will be anxious to see resolved. However, the book delves too much and too ofttimes into private prayers and their alleged responses from God, the Virgin Mary, and a host of interposing angels. The theory of 13 senses is intriguing, but one grandmother’s know-it-all spirituality becomes tiresome after it is fifth or sixth intrusion into the narrative. Villase?or is at his best when portraying the realm of social reality, including the effects of the Mexican Revolution. While libraries will not need yet another spiritual instruction manual, this book merits space on the shelves of most public libraries for the author’s skill in depicting his parents’ circumstances and social evolution. [Rayo is simultaneously publishing Los Trece Sentidos, the Spanish-language edition of this book, ISBN 0-06-621297-9, $26. Ed.] Nedra C. Evers. Sacramento P.L., C.
- Nedra C. Evers. Sacramento P.L., CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Most helpful client reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A good story may save your life
By Arline Curtiss
Victor Villasenor writes like the very re-incarnation of the Muse itself. A classicist who knows his plot, knows his characters, knows the very stars from which we all come because he writes the truth that is stranger and more mysterious than fiction. His publisher says he writes when it comes to his own family. We recognise better. We know he writes in regards to us, in regards to us as family, regarding who we want to be and how we settle for who we are. And how, at the very moment of doom, we may and will have to demand justice from our God in order to get it.

Lupe is the heroine of this fantastic saga of humane adventure. You will love Lupe. You will learn what it genuinely means to be a pretty woman from Lupe. You will learn what it genuinely means to love a man from Lupe. You will learn what it genuinely means to love life from Lupe. You will learn what it means to wake up one morning, as a new bride, and realize you have just made the biggest fault of your life from Lupe. You will learn what it actually means to honor the major commitments of your life from Lupe. You will learn how to be practically and deliciously wicked from Lupe. But most of all you will love Lupe.

12 of 14 persons found the following review helpful.
frantic and disappointing
By Lisa Dilles
I genuinely looked forward to reading this book. I had read Rain of Gold in Spanish, and genuinely I read this one in Spanish too. Mamma mia! I have never read a book with so some exclamation marks. All the bolded phrases with regards to Papito Dios etc became rather annoying as time went on. The story affiliated in this book was also tedious and silly. I’m sure his parents were great- the photos are the best percentage of the book- but I begun skimming when it comes to halfway through because I couldn’t bear the hysterical and preachy tone anymore. Sorry!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Masterful Victor Villasenor does it again!
By Marissa Selhorst
I am an avid reader. There are few books that may lead me into a matrix of wisdom and eternally modify my world. Villasenor has a universe of wisdom to portion through his captivating stories. I have read Rain of Gold which is superb and now Thirteen Senses which is each bit as marvelous. I just found out regarding Wild Steps of Heaven and
plan on partaking in yet another masterpiece. Everyone I have loaned one of his books to has become a unfeigned fan. I would highly reccommend Thirteen Senses! For that matter you can’t go faulty with any of his books.

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