From Publishers Weekly
Although Maruja is grossly obese, she dances a flamenco "like a whirling dervish [and] the men holler for more. They love her size-this mass of flab and jelly moving and shaking is somehow so life affirming, so imposing, they are transfixed by her." And so is the little boy to whom this Spanish servant of his family is a substitute mother, his own being busy in Paris, where his father is a diplomat. From the time he is six to when he turns 14, Maruja is his source of radiant love, and in these pages she is palpably vibrant and unforgettable. Jolis (Mercedes and the House of Rainbows) is a perfect translator of the wide-eyed sensibilities of the sophisticated, observant child he must have been, endowing but not distorting them with a gifted writer's hindsight. He recreates the idyllic summers he spent with Maruja, her sly husband, Manolo, and their relatives in their peasant home in Franco's Spain, where he was outrageously pampered. At 14 he had run with the bulls at Pamplona, gotten drunk, made his first advances to girls and made a night of the tapa bars in Madrid. This small masterpiece will be compared to its Nabokovian forbear.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Charm and substance go hand in hand in this delightful memoir of growing up, by an American remembering his European boyhood. The specific focus of Jolis' reminiscence is one summer, of several summers, spent with his parents' au pair couple vacationing in their native Spain in a seaside town. His parents, living in Paris because of his father's work, were basically absentee presences in his life anyway, so essentially Jolis adopted Maruja and Manolo as surrogate mother and father. Despite the repression of 1960s Spain under Franco, Maruja and Manolo unbuttoned while on their holiday, allowing their humor and lustiness free rein. The knowledge Jolis gained from the husband and wife certainly wasn't book learning, but he gleaned an inestimable education in the ways of the real world. Remembering them when he's grown, Jolis decides that "to love is to allow yourself to be haunted." And you'll love this little book and be haunted by it. Brad Hooper
