Reviews for Julian Nava: My Mexican-american Journey/mi Viaje Mexicano-americano

The average rating for Julian Nava: My Mexican-american Journey/mi Viaje Mexicano-americano based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-03 00:00:00 Riccardo Patane This was certainly interesting. First of all, there's a lot of that post-structuralist form and style mixing going on. The very first line stages the scene like it's setting up a play, only this is, of course, a novel. Then you have large passages that are made up entirely of dialogue, but without dialogue tags or any other kind of descriptive narration. Another section consists of fictional articles from the campus news letter. The book is devided into sections, each focusing on a different group of people, with the first and last sections functioning as bookends in that they both focus on the same character. The chapters within these sections focus on different characters within these groups, each dealing with his or her own tiny little subplot. So, what it comes down to is a very fractured, slice-of-life type of narrative. Only, the thing is, reading this book, I never quite found out what I was supposed to get out of it. In the end I can't even tell you if this book has an open ending, or closed. In the end the find their new president, but I have no idea what it means that this person was chosen. I don't feel like I ever managed to grasp any of the character's issues. It's not like the book is uninteresting. I happen to find the inner workings of a university, and the politics of race and class very interesting. But reading this book to me was like trying to catch a cloud of smoke with a shovel. Also forgoing diaglogue tags for dozens of pages makes a book really hard to read. I don't care how artistic it is, and how the form only emphasis the confusion and uncertainty of the rumours and gossip related in this fashion -- it's painful! I'm gonna refrain from rating this book until I've figured out how I actually feel about what I read.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-20 00:00:00 John Bendon Very similar themes and writing styles to those literary novels (usually written by white men) that we get in high school, to the degree that I'm surprised this book isn't laden down with more awards. Possibly for the same reason, while I thought the book was fine and very well written, it wasn't exactly enjoyable for me. There was a bit during the business woman arc where I thought this was going to be an uplifting joyous story (despite of the foreshadowing), and then when I started to really suspect where it was heading I kept reading anyway out of hope that the author would divert at the last minute. She did not. Ultimately this made a more complex, thematically significant story, but I disliked it so much that it negated how much I liked the earlier parts of it.