The Devolution of the Garcia Girls

I enjoyed the fact that this book was written in reverse chronological order and I’ve been wondering how exactly that alters our impressions of its events and characters. One aspect is that the first half of the book is caught up with the adult lives of the sisters, so those of their parents become overshadowed and minimized, which can lead the reader to misinterpret their characters. When the girls are adults, Papi seems like a rather depressed and difficult old man who makes great demands on everyone and emotionally distant when Yolanda is hospitalized, and when they are teenagers he is a social hazard (with his embarrassing accent and out-of-place Island-style clothing) and a tyrant (with his ripping up of Yolanda’s masterpiece). However, when they are children you see how these behaviors emerged; Papi grew up in a culture where men were taught to guard their emotions, he was hunted by the secret police in a country where any type of dissension was a death wish, and he worked hard and sacrificed his dignity so that his family could have a good life. The same goes for Mami who is just a fussy old woman who persistently mangles English expressions in the first half of the book, then her personal desires, quirky personality, and inventiveness are revealed in the second part of the book, and finally we see her as a young mother who must bravely be interrogated by secret police for her husband and pack up her life and four daughters in a single night to go to a new country. It’s interesting to see these characters get fleshed out just as the four women revert back to children.

The other aspect of the reverse chronological order is that we see the characters of the four women unravel in complexity, and we can analyze their influences, experiences and traumas with the benefit of knowing the final outcome. It’s interesting to read about these kids’ experiences when at the back of your mind you know that she turned out to be a psychologist, or she was hospitalized with a mental breakdown, or she was the one who had a stable marriage. Many of the chapters are written in first person, as if they were the autobiography of one of the girls. The final chapter is written by Yolanda and she is definitely aware of how her childhood experiences shaped her adult life. For many pages we read about the unfortunate kitten-in-drum incident, then on the final two pages she presses the fast forward button and sums up the next twenty years and psychoanalyzes the source of her artistic angst. I guess the main benefit of the book moving chronologically backwards is that it jolts the reader out of the complacency with which we follow normally unfolding stories, which makes us very conscious of time itself and how our current and past selves are linked together through continuing emotions, memories of significant events, impressions, recurrent nightmares, etc.