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Library Journal Review
Vilar came from Puerto Rico to Syracuse, New York, at the age of 15 to attend the university there. She gradually became obsessed with her mother's suicide and her grandmother's political activities promoting Puerto Rican independence. (In 1954, her grandmother, Lolita Lebrun, fired into the U.S. House of Representatives, injuring several members.) In 1988, Vilar attempted suicide and was hospitalized and treated. Here she chronicles her adolescence, experiences with psychiatric treatment, and life as a Puerto Rican, managing to bring the reader into her complex world through dense writing and references as disparate as Kierkegaard and anthropologist Oscar Lewis. She explores the dual nature of Puerto Rican American identity as reflected in her life and that of her family. A fascinating story for public library collections.Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Vilar attempted suicide with gas and razors at age 18 in 1988, while she was a student at Syracuse University in New York, where she had just arrived from her native Puerto Rico. This desperate act, she suggests in a lyrical, intense memoir, flowed from a familial pattern of self-destructiveness and tragedy. In 1954, her grandmother, militant Puerto Rican nationalist and self-styled revolutionary martyr Lolita Lebron, shot and wounded several congressmen in the U.S. House of Representatives, for which she spent 27 years in prison. In 1977, Lebron's erratic daughter, Gladys Mendez (the author's mother), while suffering from uterine cancer, leaped to her death from a car being driven by her womanizing husband, as eight-year-old Vilar tried to restrain her. The author moves freely among various topics and settings: her stay in a mental hospital after her own suicide attempt; her education in a New Hampshire experimental private school and a convent school in Spain; her sexual awakening; a miscarriage; letting go of residual guilt over the death of her mother. Though rambling and tinged with emotional confusion, her compelling story introduces a fresh, pointed voice, filled with telling insights into Latino identity, Puerto Rican history and the search for self. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Three women writers use the literary memoir to free themselves from the shackles of their pasts. It's a wonder that Ciment, author of the novel The Law of Falling Bodies (1993), became a writer at all, let alone such a powerful one. She never finished high school and got into art school only because a friend took her S.A.T. Ciment's family left Montreal for Los Angeles in 1964 when Ciment was 11 years old, a move that only exacerbated her father's irrational behavior. After the divorce, Ciment's mother and her four children plunged into the chaos of poverty. Ciment, a wild child, was anxious to help her distraught, nearly unemployable mother and became, under the tutelage of a clever con artist, a skilled forger of falsified market research surveys. Finally, after a series of harrowing adventures, Ciment got a grip, so to speak, and found love and direction. There is much sorrow in this clarifying and admirably restrained tale of suffering and redemption, much, that is, to empathize with.Vertigo is an entirely different creature. DeSalvo, a literary critic known best for her studies of Virginia Woolf and author of Conceived in Malice (1994), introduces her life story with an eloquent confession of her love for and dependence on "intellectual work," the only undertaking that holds her depression in check. For her, this malady is serious: her mother was hospitalized, and her sister committed suicide. A deep need to understand this tragic inheritance lured DeSalvo away from academic writing into the realm of the personal, where she excels both at sophisticated psychological analysis and at straight-ahead storytelling as she describes her bare-bones girlhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, her boy-crazy adolescence and college years, and the juggling of the responsibilities of wife, mother, professor, and writer. The title? It's a tribute to the Hitchcock film, which, for DeSalvo, sparked an epiphany about the dangers of desire, and a reference to the dizziness DeSalvo experiences in the face of life's demands. Suicide is also a frightening force in Vilar's memoir. Although Vilar is the youngest of these three memoirists, her story is the most complex by virtue of her mythically tragic family history and its role in Puerto Rican politics. Vilar's maternal grandmother, Lolita Lebron, walked into a 1954 session of the U.S. House of Representatives, shouted, "Freedom for Puerto Rico!" and opened fire. She spent most of the ensuing three decades in prison. Vilar's mother, prone to depression and demoralized by her husband's infidelities, escaped her eight-year-old daughter's frantic embrace and threw herself out of a moving car to her death. Ten years later, the author was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after her own suicide attempt. Vilar writes about this staggering legacy with lyric intensity, offering vivid portraits of her mother, herself as a child, and her extraordinary grandmother. Considered the patron saint of Puerto Rican nationalism, Lolita experienced visions, including one in which a voice instructed her to write "A Message from God in the Atomic Age" and send it to President Eisenhower. Vilar's Message won't alarm the FBI as the original did, but it will hold readers' rapt attention. --Donna Seaman
