Candelaria is fucked up and gorgeous

All The Things Melissa Lozada-Oliva Said (were good)

Candelaria is a story about sisters, family and identity and also about the end of the world, which, in this instance, involves a Zombie apocalypse, a dash of cannibalism and a cult for good measure. Candelaria follows three generations of women in a Guatemalan family: three sisters (one fuck up, one who ran away for a man and is presumed to be dead and one archaeologist overachiever), their mother and grandmother. Is it a lot? Yes! Is it chaotic? Yep! Did I love it? Absolutely. I was totally sucked into this bizarre and funny book which has both tender, lovely moments and also scenes that are fucking disgusting. The range! I stayed up one night reading this and my partner commented that I was “objectively riveted” and it was really a book I thoroughly enjoyed and let myself get lost in the bizarre. When I closed the book, my thoughts were what the fuck and I wish I had sisters and wow! Candelaria is absolutely a work of at times very funny surrealism - but it’s also a sharp social commentary and a meditation on diasporic identity. 

Candelaria is the first novel by Melissa Lozada-Oliva who is a poet (I love when poets write in other genres! Poets are so weird! I <3 poets) but she is also the author of Dreaming of You which is a dreamy, beautiful novel in verse about a poet who resurrects Selena Quintinalla from the dead, which is also not to be missed. I also love this poem “There is an Intimacy” of Melissa’s. As you can see, I am a fan of Melissa’s but am lucky to also be friends with her. I met Melissa through my friend Puloma Ghosh (whose short story collection Mouth  is out next spring and you bet will be featured here) and am happy to report that Melissa is just as funny and smart IRL as she is on the page. I asked if she would share some of her favorite book recs and, to the surprise of no one, these are all great and I will be ordering all of them and also joining Melissa in a re-read of Shirley Jackson this October.

If you happen to be in DC, Melissa and I will actually be in conversation about Candelaria on September 29th at the bookstore Politics and Prose - would love to see you there!

Here’s Melissa <3

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Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link 

Kelly Link’s stories suck you in the way a crossword puzzle can, except the crossword puzzle is not a crossword puzzle at all, but a tunnel filled with bunnies that are getting larger and larger. Anyone who tries to describe what she does ends up using metaphor, because you really can’t explain it, and I think that’s so cool. Her stories make you anxiously attached to their characters while you drive yourself crazy trying to find out what will happen to them and what the hell is going on. And even with all the weirdness, and all the puzzles, and all the blending of realities, what she seems most concerned with is what we fail to tell each other and what we leave behind. My favorite story is “I Can See Right Through You.”

The Haunting of Hill House  by Shirley Jackson

I personally hate the Netflix adaptation of this book, which didn’t want to give into Shirley Jackson’s nihilism or cynicism about domesticity or fate, and how women are never really free. Probably because it was made by a man, slay!!!  Anyway, I read this book every Halloween like a nerd, have a tattoo about it, nerd, am very in love with the structure, nerd, and love seeing the character’s slow descent to her fate — slay.  Jackson shows us that so much about what’s scary about a house is the architecture itself (I am an English major!!), that sometimes things are just built to haunt, which also means that we are always what haunts us. Read it when you’re pretending the fall still exists. 

Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus

Anthony Bourdain inside of a hotdog suit making love to a woman dressed up as a gendered pickle is kind of what this book is like. Jamie’s brain neurons are constantly firing off and I’m envious of her thought process and sentence structure, where she somehow rams in three jokes about diarrhea or period blood, and then says something profound about class structures and union labor. She travels throughout the US with her ex, her dog and her cat trying hot dogs and describing her scenery with the eye of a trained journalist and a woman gazing out a big window looking for love. She is vulnerable with you but to the point. It isn’t confessional, it’s just the facts. 

Jawbone by Monica Ojejda 

This book is disgusting. Just gross.  Sometimes I had to put it down because it was so repulsive. I LOVED IT. If you ever want to see how metaphor can make you squirm in your seat because you feel like you are pulling back your fingernail and you’re turned on by it (?)  read this book. Two wealthy teenage girls in Ecuador at a private school are obsessed with each other in an Elena Ferrrante, classic female, are-they-in-love-or-in-friendship kind of way. One of them, Annelise, loves telling her group of friends “creepypasta” stories, online lore that is so specifically unsettling because it’s tinged with loneliness and blue screens. Very We Are all Going to the World’s Fair and Skinamarink (never watching that, I like to sleep!) vibes. Annelise invents something called the White God, who appears at the end of every one of her stories, and she has her friends participate in dares that serve as worshipping the White God. At the same time, her best friend, Fernanda, has been kidnapped by their teacher who can’t stop impersonating her dead mother. There’s so much to this book, but mostly it’s about this specific mortal fear of women growing older, having a child and it having its own mind, your body exploding because of that child, the grotesqueness and perverseness of puberty, and the tittering balance between fear and desire. Most unsettling experience reading I’ve ever had in my life. 

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The cover of this book makes you think it’s a rom-com about a bakery, and it sooooo not. One time I was shelving books at this kiosk in Boston’s South End terminal and the boss told me to put the book in “women’s literature” and I was like that’s so insulting, why, and he was like “because there’s cake on the cover.” Many years have passed and actually I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having cake on a cover or being shelved in women’s literature. I think it’s really cool actually! Anyway, I wish I had the experience of reading this book for the first time forever. In it, a girl discovers that when she eats, she can feel the feelings of whoever made the food. The first time is with the lemon cake her mother made for her birthday and she realizes how DEPRESSED her mom is. It makes eating insufferable, and it makes the only enjoyable thing Doritos, because they’re so removed from people and made in a factory. We follow her throughout he rlife, dealing with her burden and trying to find love. As she gets older, she realizes she’s not the only person in her family with a strange relationship to inanimate objects. I don’t want to give too much away, but I felt very seen by just how bizaare everything gets, and how the unexplainable can only be explained by magic, and how magic can sometimes be horrific and not wanted at all. A great book for people dealing with grief, eating disorders, or genuine mental illness. Also besides all of those things I just said … it’s actually a very lovely read. I promise.  

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki 

The way this book was sold to me was morbid, but it did pull me in. I feel strange about it, and maybe you will too: After writing the title story, which ends with the line ‘The boredom is done,’ the writer took her own life. In this story, teens can only feel alive through violence, and this one girl is trying her best not to give into it, because she is still able to cry at movies. It’s a gorgeous story. Other stories include “At the Seaside Club,” where people’s consciousness are uploaded to a fake planet so that they can figure out their lives, and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” where a man is visited by a super old woman only to realize it’s his recent ex-girlfriend. Suzuki was doing the Black Mirror thing, and a million times better. She understood devastating her readers in that she didn’t seem to care about them. She just wanted to make art and knew that we didn’t want to look away.  

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Thank you Melissa! You are extremely smart and well-read and I’m so glad you came on to my little newsletter! Melissa is on a book tour right now so you should absolutely go see her if she’s coming somewhere near you!

In terms of my own reading, I’ve been a bit in research-land but I started The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez and am obsessed (surprise surprise). Other recommended reading: this poem “Real Romantic” by Rachelle Taormino, the profile “Marissa Zappas, the Perfumer for a More Beautiful World” by Sophia June (fine this is research but I loved this and just bought another bottle of Marissa Zappas’ perfume Flaming Creature after going through a whole bottle) and this essay “The ‘Unhinged Bisexual Woman’ Novel” by Emma Copley Eisenberg. 

Okay that’s all I got! Go buy Candelaria or request it at your library and enjoy!

Bye babe, talk soon -

xoxo,

Ariél