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Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito centers around the life of Pilar as told by her granddaughter Meli. The young Pilar's liaison with the son of a monied and proud family cuts her off from her own family, leaves her socially adrift, alone, and, finally, affects her relationship with her oldest friend. It is in the act of narration, moving in soft rhythms and slowly revealed stories, that Meli reclaims her relationship withher grandmother and mother. Reaching out with her imagination, she binds together the three generations of women burdened by secrets and frees herself to come back to the Puerto Rico she has fled.

"This is a novel redolent with the smells of tropical flowers, the taste of mangoes, coconuts and rum, the touch of earth and sea, the sounds of birds, the voices of [Puerto Rican] women...Marta, who gave birth to Pilar, who gave birth to Luisa, who gave birth to Meli, the narrator/listener. Tying the generations together, lifting the narrative to the plane of magic realism, and connecting it for a moment to Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits is Seña Alba...midwife, healer, conscience, guardian and seer--a witch and folk hero...A novel worth reading." --New Directions for Women

"A moving and powerful novel that explores how the forces of colonialism, misogyny and racism emerge in the lives of a family affected by this history. The language of the narrative is rich and evocative and the characters are both real and surreal in the intensity of imagination. An important book." --Susan Griffin

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this sensitive and lyrical first novel, de Monteflores writes of three generations of Puerto Rican women. The dialogue appears in Puerto Rican Spanish and then is translated, a technique that at first distracts the reader but soon becomes familiar as part of the author's poetic language. The memories of these women are intertwined with the story of Sena Alba, witch and midwife, who watches over them all. Their stories echo the conflicts between black and Spanish culture, between men and women, and within families. Though granddaughter Meli escapes some of these smothering conflicts in her flight to New York, she still recalls, ``I hear the call to the wind abuelita taught me. It comes up in me suddenly, loosening memories. Language of the soul.''-- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

De Monteflores charts the sexual and spiritual evolution of three generations of women in a class- and race-conscious Puerto Rican family. The grandmother, Pilar, was estranged as a young woman from the rest of the family in the house of her lover; Luisa, her strong-minded daughter, mourns a lost love; and Meli, the narrator and Luisa's child, attempts to understand them both, aided by Sena Alba, the wise midwife. Though the tale is told in flashbacks that traverse the lives of all four, de Monteflores' storytelling skill and her seamless interweaving of past and present make every moment seem current, every character real. The prose is cinematic, from the rich descriptions and smooth segues to the convention of "subtitling": all dialogue in the novel is printed first in Spanish, then in italicized English. A romantic and sorrowful story of rediscovering one's youth and the urge to live one's own life, set against the vagaries of communicating with those you love. --Eloise Kinney

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Born near San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1933, Carmen de Monteflores came to the United States at age sixteen to study art at Wellesley College, where she received a B.A. in 1953. She studied sculpture in Paris and painting in New York City, and continued her work as an artist while living at a cattle ranch in Montana and raising five children. After the family moved to California in the late sixties, Carmen stopped painting, began writing, entered graduate school, and came out as a lesbian. In 1978 she completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and is currently a practicing psychotherapist.

Since her first novel Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito (Aunt Lute, 1989), Carmen has published a book of poems, written and produced two plays, released a second novel, Possessions (Dog Ear Publishing, 2009), and is currently working on a third novel. Carmen has also published articles and essays dealing with a range of topics from psychotherapy to gender/sexuality studies. She lives in Berkeley, California with her partner, their child, a dog, a cat, two birds, and a recently planted apple tree.