Cellophane

Charming. Engaging. Thought-provoking. And, most importantly to me, honest.

Over the decades I've collected a set of neurotic and semicapricious rules about my reading; rules I've discovered, not really invented; patterns I've noticed about the books that work for me or don't. You doubtless have your own. I don't know if mine are accurate, and I don't really understand why my brain works the way it does; but one guideline that stands out to me in fiction is that a world must be consistent within itself, and without too much “cheating.” Cheating can be hard to pin down, and I suspect that some days I'm more forgiving than others, but in general books that feel cheaty end up on my Abandoned pile. The Harry Potter books, much as I enjoyed parts of them, are cheaty. Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, to my constant wonder, have never felt so.

I mention this because, throughout my entire reading of Cellophane, I kept wondering: where is she going with this? Am I going to feel cheated? (Within reason: this is magical realism after all). And, as much as she skirts the edge, I never felt cheated. Captivated and enthralled, certainly, and thinking back on it I can't really figure out why! On the surface, Cellophane deals with a somewhat megalomaniacal eccentric, a Fitzcarraldo type who relocated to the deep Amazon two decades ago to (successfully, unlike Fitz) pursue a dream of manufacturing paper; he is now obsessed with producing cellophane, and the instant he does, a curse starts to settle on his hacienda: a curse of truth-telling, of inappropriate transparency. (Get it? Get it?) More curses are to follow.

What makes Cellophane work, I think, is Arana's heart. Her characters are not always threedimensional, but certainly two and a half, painted with love and compassion. (Not always—there are cookiecutter villains—but the people we care about can be complex and do not always go where we expect them to). Arana understands the difficulty of human communication and weaves that as an underlying theme throughout. And throughout it all, Arana's voice is filled with tenderness, kindness, some wistfulness over our quirky human customs, and a distinct curiosity toward examining our assumptions and perspectives. I enjoyed this so much more than I had ever expected.