| Author/Contributor(s): | Rivera-Valdes, Sonia; Cluster, Dick; Harss, Marina; Schafer, Mark; West-Durán, Alan |
| Publisher: | Seven Stories Press |
| Date: | 3/6/2001 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
Marta Veneranda, a Latina nuyorkina, finds that she inspires the confessional in people. In fact, when people come to her, they feel the need to reveal their most embarrassing and shameful stories. And through these reluctantly told tales, where characters enter and leave each other's narrations, Rivera-Valdes revisits and questions our most basic behavioral assumptions.
In "Little Poisons," the narrator shares with Marta the minutiae of her self-help-book-assisted liberation from her philandering husband, whom she will eventually poison to death, and whose mistress she will befriend: "In the fifteen years of marriage he would tell me everything, even about his sexual escapades—if he couldn't share them with me, who would he share them with? Besides, that way no one could come running to me spreading rumors."
The Forbidden Stories is the author's inspired response to a statement made by a Cuban politician regarding the conflicted attitude towards homosexuality in Cuba. Rivera-Valdés creates the character of Marta Veneranda, a graduate student working on a thesis which aims to graph clinically the discrepancy between an individual's sense of shame and society's attitude toward the incidents that inspire self-censorship in a person. But the orderly study becomes unruly as the subjects interviewed reveal their hidden stories.
Beneath the humor is a dead-serious scrutiny of the commingling of Anglo and Latino cultures. At heart, The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda are an exposé of the comforts and discomforts of that cohabitation.