Rudolfo Anaya ‘s newest book, The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, is a hybrid—identified as fiction on its credits page, it is also an epistolary monologue, addressed to “Dear K,”; a meditation full of philosophical musings on life, land, religion, myths, nature and the cosmos; a history of the Southwestern United States—especially Albuquerque, the New Mexican lands surrounding it , and the beginnings of the Chicano Movement; with a central story embracing an autobiography wrapped in the guise of a biography of a close childhood friend and fellow writer, Alfonso.
About one quarter of the way into The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, the writer, only identified as “I,’ writes: “K, I’m slow. I suddenly realized I’ve been writing stories. Or something like stories wrapped in letters. I wrote too, you know. Not as well as Fonso, but I wrote. Never published. I used to show my stuff to Fonso. He encouraged me. But no, he was the writer….So here goes, more stories. Bet they never get published. Ha!” This bit of self-irony ignores the lists of Anaya’s publications given at the back of this book. With twenty-five volumes of adult literature, eleven children’s books, plus the five books for which he served as editor, publication was clearly not an insurmountable problem for Anaya!
The book’s title cues its formal inspiration: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s loosely autobiographical epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, (1774, 1787). The anonymous writer of The Sorrows of Young Alfonso introduces us to his long-time close friend, Alfonso. And thereby hands us another clue: Alfonso is also Rudolfo Anaya’s middle name.
We learn how the writer and Alfonso grew up together, and how they shared the experience of life-changing accidents as young teenagers, from which they never fully recovered. Each personally caused by a failed dare-devil -feat, the effects of their handicaps continue to influence the paths of their lives: “Trauma kills us or makes us stronger. I think that’s why he became a writer, to tell with each story the making of soul.”
Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther as a young man (he was twenty-four years old at the time of the first edition’s publication), consumed by an unattainable lost love, Lotte. Anaya wrote The Sorrows of Young Alfonso as a man in his late seventies, and although he dwells in memories of times Alfonso shared with one youthful true love, Agnes, who accidentally died as a teenager and his deep love of his late wife Patricia (whose story, he tells the reader, he has already written so will not linger on thoughts of her in Alfonso’s story), it seems to me the great loss he ponders in this book is the home of his birth and the life of his Mexican American family and their community, living in harmony with the landscape of the New Mexican llano. On the llano, he writes:
“The river is in me, he [Alfonso] said. I didn’t understand what he meant. ‘The llano is in me,’ he said. ‘The people are in me.’ La gente. His soul was made from those things. He made soul from nature and people.” (p. 95)
“Sunsets were burned into his memory….Alfonso carried sunset images in his heart, He was forever caught in that time when he stood alone on the llano, shivering from the lingering coolness of the afternoon rain, looking into the fire of the setting sun, becoming one with fire, clouds, light, and color….The setting sun that day was as spectacular and glorious as any sunset on the llano…It made me think. We humans can only absorb so much beauty. People jump off the edge into the Grand Canyon; others jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s more than suicide; I think it’s a way of walking into the sunset and disappearing. Agape. I wonder if that’s the same feeling some get at the end of life. A feeling that you’re intimately involved in the earth’s consciousness, ready to let go of the body’s love for the next day, ready for rapture.” (p. 159-161)
On the history of Mexican Americans in the 1940s and 50s:
“The majority of people from that area [of West Texas, where his family had traveled to pick cotton] were poor. Hispanics had been in the state over four hundred years, but except for a few rich families who owned land, the majority remained rural poor. Most had little or no education. Alfonso’s mother stressed education to her children. The village school taught only the first few grades. In town, Alfonso and his sisters could graduate from high school. But work was not easy to come by, especially for their parents, who had only a second-grade education.” (p. 93)
“Sons usually followed in their fathers’ line of work. A few were breaking the chain and aspiring to something different, college or a move to California for a better-paying job. Change was in the air in the barrios but it came at a cost. Mainstream society had barriers, visible and invisible, and only a trickle could break through. Glass ceilings. Hell, that’s nothing new. Study the history of minorities in this country.
“The middle class wasn’t a barrio issue. Maybe one or two families made enough money to qualify as middle class. Those who owned the barrio’s grocery stores, cafes, gas stations, and furniture stores had money. Those who worked in the railroad shops made fair wages, owned a home and car—a working class that barely rose above the poverty line. Some Nuevo Mexicanos were starting trade businesses that didn’t require higher education, and a few were entering professional fields, especially law. In New Mexico, attorneys and politics went hand in hand…..Mostly it was menial work for menial wages. The Hispanic labor force was good for the city, but there was not much of a future for the works.
“….Life was nothing like what was portrayed in the black-and-white television shows of the time. There were no I Love Lucy or Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet families in the barrio. Life was difficult. I still look back in anger. So did Alfonso. ” (pages 166; 173)
On how the anonymous writer, “I,” thinks about this book:
“…I put my novel aside and began writing about those years when Alfonso and I were close friends. I know I’m writing memories. Do my memories become a memoir? Am I writing his biography? …Damn! Is my novel mixed in with these letters? How much of my novel is becoming Alfonso’s story? How much of Alfonso is becoming the character in my story? ….Will my letters reveal Alfonso or my fictional character, who really isn’t completely fictional because he is me? But I gave the character a new name, so he is not me. ….I guess I’ve opened Pandora’s box, or Alfonso’s box, meaning his life is now pouring into my memoir/novel/biography/whatever you wish to call it. How will you decide? (pages 113-114)
On a philosophy of life:
“I asked her once [referring to the curandera , Agapita, a folk healer who helped bring him into the world and to recover some muscle function after the teenage accident], ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Life is like a river,’ she said seriously. My innocent eyes grew wide and I repeated, ‘Wow, life is like a river?’ She started laughing so loud, it set a nearby covey of doves to flight. Her eyes watered from laughing. Once more she had pulled my leg. When she stopped laughing, she said, ‘I don’t know the meaning, No one does. Live one day at a time and enjoy. Experience life. Be thankful. The end will come of its own accord, neither predestined nor thought out. It just comes. What you do is all there is. Be kind Alfonso.’ I hope I have obeyed her command.” (p. 198)
On God:
“So what’s real? we poor mortals ask. Let God decide. Or scientists, those who break atoms apart and tell us the resulting subatomic particles are the only reality we know….Anyway, the particle began to be called the God particle. As if God is a particle. I think God is bigger than that. God created the universe, so God is the universe, expanding galaxies, a dance and song so wondrous it can kill just to contemplate it. “ (p. 140)
These are but a few examples of how Rudolfo Anaya successfully cites an old masterwork, using it to apply to his own region and time, and to navigate the line between fiction and memoir.
Carla Blank, reviewer
All quotes are from Rudolfo Anaya, The Sorrows of Young Alfonso (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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The Sorrows of Young Werther (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German literary figure was a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, critic, theater director, and statesman.
Tragic masterpiece explores mind of an artist in alternately joyful and despairing letters recounting an unhappy romance. Goethe addresses issues of love, death, and redemption in an influential portrayal of a character who struggles to reconcile his artistic sensibilities with the demands of the objective world.
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EXTRAORDINÁRIO. Obra sublime, tocante e inesquecível
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