Format - Hardcover

Condition - Good

Listed - 7 months ago

Views - 2

Publication Date - Feb 2001

Seller Description

Publisher Description

ISBN: 0060185678

Selected as the first winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is a beautifully written, lyrical first novel that offers a rare window into another culture. Its irresistible heroine takes the reader into her Mexican world and the experience is unforgettable. Barbara Kingsolver founded the Bellwether Prize in support of a literature of social change. In her words, Donna Gershten's novel has "the kind of political boldness and complexity we're hoping to promote with this prize. It sets a standard for what we're defining as a literature of social responsibility." Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is the fictional memoir of Guadalupe Magdalena Molina V#65533;squez -- wife, scoundrel, courtesan, and mother. In a world where gender and class roles are unbending, and religion predominant, Magda creates a philosophy of life that she can thrive in, a religion of cynical optimism, pragmatism, and determined gratitude. The invincible yet fallible Magda climbs from the poor barrio of a coastal Mexican town to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded youth to oncoming blindness. In the Golden Zone of Teatl#65533;n, Sinaloa, Mexico, where tourists and wealthy Mexicans thrive and where poor Mexicans come only to work or to visit the shrine of the miracle baby Jesus, Guadalupe Magdalena Molina V#65533;squez performs her daily ritual. In the chair of her beloved T#65533;a Chucha, mortared to the roof of her Golden Zone home, Magda shaves her long legs, tells her life stories, and thrusts her fierce prayers of gratitude toward the Sea of Cort#65533;s. "More cabr#65533;n than hunger is the person who has suffered it," Magda says, and in her unsentimental and savvy fashion, she recounts her life strategies -- seasoned with an earthy, hard-earned wisdom -- so that she might pass them along to her half-American daughter, Martina, and to her young Mexican cousin, Isabel. Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is a novel about love, the power of sex, and the struggles of women. It is about the secrets of survival. It is about what a woman can do.