The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Agüero Sisters by Cristina GarciaJane Juffer
Cristina Garcia. The Agüero Sisters. Knopf, 1997. 300 pp. $23.00.
In Cristina Garcia’s second novel history haunts the present, threatening to overwhelm the two Cuban sisters who struggle in different ways to let the past enter their lives in manageable but honest increments. Their stories are told through a complex interweaving of past and present, personal and political, focusing on the everyday lives of Reina and Constancia but never isolating the quotidian details from the politics of Cuba and the Cuban exile community. Perhaps because of this careful adherence to the daily effects of political decisions rather than to governmental proclamations, The Agüero Sisters finds a nonjudgmental yet passionate tone in which to tell the painful story of Cuba, Cubans, and Cuban-Americans. Through her description of Reina, a faithful but critical supporter of the revolution, Garcia demonstrates both the harshness and the hope of life in Castro’s Cuba. The novel also reveals the hypocrisies of wealthy Cuban exiles such as Constancia and her husband yet refuses to deny the power of their longing for a Cuba that perhaps never existed. Admittedly, the author’s sympathies seem to lie with Reina, who embraces whatever sensual pleasures life offers as an alternative to didactic politics: “What she enjoys most is the freedom from a finality of vision, of a definitive version of life’s meaning.” Constancia, meanwhile, seems caught up in the capitalist/Horatio Alger myth, producing her own line of cosmetics designed to help women stave off the effects of aging. When the two sisters are reunited in Miami, their separate stories and voices merge in an attempt to uncover the truth of their mother’s death. The novel does not dissolve the sisters’ differences in a false display of resolution, but shows how the very clash produces a passion of remembrance that, finally, writes their family’s history. This history stands in contrast to their father’s own first-person narrative which is woven throughout the novel and which is discredited for its inability to see its place within a larger context. As such, The Agüero Sisters functions as a powerful testament to the importance of recovering history through the telling of women’s stories, yet it refuses to place the storytellers on a pedestal, making the act of speaking/writing itself a product of everyday life. [Jane Juffer]