Review by New York Times Review
IN 1985, a Yale professor named Jaroslav Pelikan published "Jesus Through the Centuries," a book he described as "not a life of Jesus . . . but a series of images portraying his place in the history of culture" These notions of Christ have been irreconcilably varied over 2,000 years, sometimes bolstering the powerful and sometimes consoling the powerless: the rabbi, the light of the gentiles, the king of kings, the cosmic Christ, the son of man, the monk who rules the world, the bridegroom of the soul, the universal man, the prince of peace, the teacher of common sense, the liberator, the man who belongs to the world. But I wonder if his account is incomplete without Amadeo Padilla, protagonist of "The Five Wounds" - one of three legitimate masterpieces in Kirstin Valdez Quade's haunting and beautiful debut story collection, "Night at the Fiestas." Padilla, the story tells us, is "no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the lambs." His teeth are bad, his skin is bad, his scalp is fight-scarred. "You name the sin," Quade writes, "he's done it": gluttony, sloth, sex with a second cousin on the high school bleachers. Padilla's plan is to one-up a rival who has been unable to open or close his hands since a 1962 Passion play, when he carried a wooden cross through the streets of the northern New Mexico city where most of this book is set, followed by a self-flagellating procession of penitents, then "begged the hermanos to use nails." But Padilla's righteous mission to embody Christ's pain is called into question by his 14-year-old daughter, Angel, who shows up eight months pregnant in "white tank top, black bra, gold cross pointing the way to her breasts in case you happened to miss them." Angel's outward profanities match her father's. Thinking about her unborn son, she reflects first that the child's penis is inside her, then, following the same logic, tells her father that "Gramma is the first girl" his was inside, and then, to complete the affront: "Jesus, too. Jesus had his stuff in Mary. Couple of virgins. There's something for your research." But her real profanity - the transgression too far - is her desire to enter what now passes for a sacred space, a gas station turned morada where a human-haired wooden Christ, "ancient and bloody . . . violence in the very carving," is nailed to the wall, where Padilla is meant to contemplate it in preparation for his own pageant of crucifixion. The problem is that women are not allowed in the morada, especially pregnant 14-year-old women. It's a knowledge shared implicitly, but the implicit is not a mode Angel favors. She accuses Padilla: "You think I'm too dirty for your morada. Is that it? Too dirty for your morada, too dirty for prom, too dirty for everything." For Padilla, these words echo in guilty memory the accusations of whorishness he slung at his daughter's mother in the aftermath of her making, and love overcomes propriety. He agrees to take her into the morada. Why does this choice open up with such power? As the poet Mary Ruefle once wrote, "the words secret and sacred are siblings." For love, Padilla violates the code of the community's closed system and risks his planned redemption. When Manuel Garcia, his wounded rival, learns that "a whore been in the morada," he threatens to tell the hermanos. "You watch how quick they cut you down from that cross," he tells Padilla. "They'll cut you down fast." The old penitente means to exact a cost from Padilla, and by the next evening, Padilla will watch helplessly through the window as his daughter allows Garcia to molest her briefly in the front yard as the price of the silence required to allow Padilla his role in the procession, his Jesus moment. Was it worth it? The story continues from Padilla's point of view, but I couldn't help seeing what follows through the eyes of the daughter. What is it like to watch your father play Jesus, carrying his cross up the Via Dolorosa, the ancient way of suffering, a crown of thorns piercing his flesh as neighborhood men curse and tear at him? The hermanos are following, whipping themselves, and your father cries: "Whip me! " Earlier, in the morada, Padilla's daughter asks him: "You really want to know what it feels like? Why?" Although he can't find the words to answer her, he thinks about how he needs to know "if he has it in him to ask for the nails, if he can get up there in front of the whole town and do a performance so convincing he'll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. . . . Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right." As in all the cultures Jaroslav Pelikan described, what Padilla sees reflected in Jesus is the answer to his own localized problem. In the sacred thickness of the secret space, contemplating the wooden Christ, he must steady himself against the weight of realization by touching the wall, and here is what he sees: "At the front of the room, Jesus hasn't moved, wholly absorbed in his own pain." Later, high on the mock Golgotha, after the mayor has cleaned each nail with alcohol, wiped each with a white handkerchief, pounded each through Padilla's palms, the people stare at his daughter "to see if some of the bad girl is getting washed out of her," and as Padilla twists in agony on the cross, the people applaud. IT IS COMMON PRACTICE, near the bottom of a review like this one, to say the undercutting thing the reviewer is too polite to say in the first paragraph. But there is nothing undercutting to say about this book, which caused me to weep so many times I failed to finish most of its stories in a single sitting. The collection reminds us, again and again, that each of us has only one life, and forces us to confront the biggest questions: Shouldn't that one life matter, shouldn't that life be worth remembering, shouldn't it be worth examining, contemplating, pursuing in understanding, even though all varieties of understanding are so difficult, so time-bound, so provisional? This is a variety of beauty too rare in contemporary literature, a synthesis of material and practice and time and courage and love that must have cost its writer dearly; it's not easy to be so vulnerable so consistently. Quade attempts, page by page, to give up carefully held secrets, to hold them up to the light so we can get at the truth beneath, the existential truth. Perhaps this is as close as we can get to what is sacred in an age in which so many have otherwise rejected the idea of the sacred. While reading, I often wondered whether a better title for the collection might have been "Via Dolorosa," or "The Way of Suffering." This is a book suffused with the desire to reclaim what has been lost, with longing for love misplaced, with the search for the "astonishing" relief, as one character puts it, at being "the kind of person who might meet another person's need." But Quade's title is fitting. It is the way of suffering that makes the night at the fiestas, where people are "fighting and kissing and dancing wildly," shine so bright in memory. The idea of what it will become is its most salient animating feature. What it is, what it was and what comes after are what we're left to contemplate in the white space that follows every story. Because what else makes a story worthwhile except the attempt to reckon with the near-in articulable answer to the question we're all asking in the dark: What was all that? KYLE MINOR is the author of the story collection "Praying Drunk."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 29, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In this stunning debut story collection, Quade pits estranged children against struggling parents, forges scenes of disconcerting domesticity, and works a kind of magic with her prose. A perfect example is Family Reunion, in which a distressed Mormon mother absconds to the woods for a secret getaway with her daughter, Morgan, and a non-Mormon girl, Claire. Quade enumerates the oddities of their lives, including Claire's family's exceptional cuisine (rotting cheeses, dal with asafetida), not to mention Claire's mother's failed first marriage. In other stories, Quade draws outsider characters from the periphery. In The Five Wounds, a reluctant father plays the role of Christ, bearing a cross and suffering the walk to Calvary, in order to impress his pregnant daughter, Angel. In Nemecia, a troubled teenager usurps her young cousin, Maria, to lead the procession for the feast of Corpus Christi but harbors a dark secret about the death of her mother. In her fierce authenticity and gift for crafting character, Quade earns her place alongside fellow excellent newcomers Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Valeria Luiselli, and Molly Antopol.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
All the characters in Quade's auspicious debut collection of 10 stories live in New Mexico, but it's a tribute to her artistry that each story feels vivid and new. Quade's ability to depict an entire world within the limitations of a single story, and to produce a collection with both unity and breadth, is reminiscent of Alice Munro. In the title story, a restless girl named Frances, on the brink of adolescence, looks beyond her small world-her father is a bus driver taking revelers to an annual celebration, and her older cousin Nancy wants only to drink and flirt. The opening story, "Nemecia," also involves an older female cousin, the title character, whom the narrator views with a complex mix of awe, jealousy, and fear. "The Guesthouse" brings a contentious family together on the occasion of a grandmother's funeral. In "Ordinary Sins," pregnant Crystal has tumultuous and layered relationships with a pair of priests. The final story, "The Manzanos," which focuses on grief through the eyes and mind of a young girl, is an emotional tour de force. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Last fall, the National Book Foundation chose former Stegner fellow Quade as one of its Five Under 35 authors, and rightly so, as this first collection demonstrates. In language that's fluid, forthright, and emotionally bracing, she comes up with stories that surprise every time. All the stories are set in New Mexico and feature characters in doubt and in betrayal. In the title piece, a somewhat mousy teenage girl travels to town for the big fiesta (with her embarrassingly obsequious father as bus driver), exacting an uncertain revenge after a disturbing encounter with a stranger. In "Nemecia," the narrator recalls a high-handed older cousin favored by the family when she comes to live with them after a tragedy whose real nature emerges much later. In "The Guesthouse," a dutiful son's revelatory confrontation with his sister and estranged father after his maternal grandmother's death involves a vivid tableau with rats and a very large snake. "The Five Wounds" features loser Amadeo, who commits himself to reenacting the passion of Christ in a shockingly realistic penitential drama and experiences something other than the transfiguration he expected. -VERDICT A piercingly perfect debut collection from a young writer who's already arrived; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/13/14.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Though not all of these 10 short stories are equal in their teen appeal, those that have it are clever and surprising. "Jubilee," for example, concerns two neighbor girls home from Stanford for the summer. Parker, the oldest, is the daughter of a ranch owner, while scholarship student Andrea's father is a worker on the ranch. Andrea has a chip on her shoulder about Parker's wealth that spills over in ugly, unexpected ways. In the title story, teenage Frances rides her father's bus to the downtown fiesta but gets in over her head when she flirts with a "painter." Each of the stories is set in a rural New Mexico-a setting not often represented in fiction. Most feature characters with unrelenting hubris being forced to examine their often prejudiced attitudes toward others. The role of religion is examined in three different stories. In "The Five Wounds," Amadeo is hoping to play the role of Jesus in this year's Good Friday celebration when his foul-mouthed, pregnant teenage daughter arrives on his doorstep. In "Family Reunion," Claire goes on vacation with her Mormon neighbors, but Mormonism isn't what she thought it might be. Finally, in "Ordinary Sins," a woman works at a rectory and gets drawn into a conflict between the beloved older priest and the strict newcomer. This work offers dark and often hopeless but thoughtful portrayals of working class New Mexicans from different perspectives. VERDICT Like many anthologies, pick and choose the stories to share/read/teach.-Jamie Watson, Baltimore County Public Library © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Debut collection of stories set in New Mexico from an award-winning writer.Family tiesand family fissuresplay a significant role in each piece. Catholic faith and practice are also prominent. In "The Five Wounds," a perennially unemployed and generally defeated man prepares to play the role of Jesus in a Passion play while trying to deal with his pregnant teenage daughter. Although the symbolic resonances are heavy, Quade's plainspoken style and mordant sense of humor save the story from bathos: "Thirty-three years old, the same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that." Indeed, many of these stories illuminate a world in which religious belief gives shape to everyday reality. "Ordinary Sins"previously published in The New Yorkerfeatures another unwed, expectant mother negotiating a religious world in which women have no authority. Corpus Christi celebrations provide a climactic turning point in "Nemecia," the strongest story in the collection and the one that gained entry into Best American Short Stories 2013. Quade offers readers a door into worlds that are likely unfamiliar, and she gives them the gift of letting them find their own ways. She doesn't bother to describe, for example, the society of flagellants that has existed in New Mexicojust beneath the official notice of the churchfor centuries, nor does she explain the different worldviews and doctrinal positions of an American priest and his more conservative African colleague. But while she grounds her stories in a specific cultural setting, Quade offers visions of family that have universal resonance. In "Mojave Rats," a young mother is outsmarted and overwhelmed by her 7-year-old daughter, and her recognition of this fact does nothing to change it. Quade is a writer to watch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
