La Quinta Soledad
The Wife of Bath, Retold: A Chicana Point-of-View
From the Backlist
Silviana Wood’s 617-page debut novel La Quinta Soledad is a winding narrative full of lightning and thunder told in free-wheeling hybrid calo (Chicano dialect) by an aging, working-class Chicana named Quinta. The narrative voice is interspersed with a linguistic treasure trove of English-Spanish neologisms, playful double-entendres, and a dash of Yiddish. She narrates the story of her abuela, Nana Conchita, and the origin of their family name, Soledad. Reading the novel is like eavesdropping into the family drama and the lives of her four sisters, ruled by the strong hand of their Nana, who loves to chastise them all for their sinverguenzada (shamelessness). In short, Quinta is the delightful impish trickster character that gives readers a history of their plight, capturing every historical etching and minutia of suffering, working-class Chicanx endured the last 50 years, even if tapered by the voice of her Nana, the archetypal abuelita figure familiar in extended family households. No matter what happens in this delightful long tale, Nana tries her magisterial best to tame Quinta's libido. Aligned with her name, Quinta’s character is a symbolic allusion to the cultural myths of Aztlan, the cultural landscape of the Aztecs, and her story is a memoir and love letter to Chicana culture.
About the Reviewer
Rafael C. Castillo is the author of Distant Journeys (Bilingual Review Press), Aurora (Berkeley Press/Floricanto), and Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street (2023; Peter Lang International). His stories, essays, reviews, epistolary notes, and ruminations have appeared in The New Mexico Humanities Review, CCH Humanities Review, Southwestern American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Palo Alto Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Hearst publications, including the Washington Post syndicate. His stories and articles have been anthologized in Lone Star Literature (Norton), Southwest Tales (Maize Press), New Growth II, and Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford University Press).