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Childhood is the age of discovery. Some kids fall in love with horses, some with dolls, others toy cars or butterfly collections. But Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, in Marie Arana's captivating new novel, Cellophane, isn't like other little girls and boys.
"He had always wanted to be an engineer," Arana writes, "a builder of mills, a virtuoso of machinery, a maestro of paper."
Victor grows up in Lima, Peru, at the end of the 19th century. To make his dreams of paper production come true, he sets off along a branch of the Amazon in search of a factory site. He is accompanied by his beautiful wife, Dooa Mariana. Don Victor is drawn deeper and deeper not only into his quest to bring modern industry to the wild rain forest but also into an involvement with the supernatural beliefs of the tribes who live there.
Arana's writing is influenced by the magic realism of Latin American fiction, so that even Don Victor's manufacture of boring brown paper has an element of witchcraft to it. And when he sets his sights on the translucent, shimmering new invention cellophane, all sorts of strange things start to happen.
A "plague of truth" hits Floralinda, the settlement the Sobrevillas have built, so that no one can keep secrets any longer. A fever of greed and sexual hunger breaks out, as well as political unrest and social resentment among formerly devoted workers.
Arana, author of the well-received memoir American Chica, is editor of the Washington Post Book World. In this novel she both acts as a writer and uses papermaking as a metaphor for writing, holding it up, as Don Victor does with his cellophane, so that it catches the light of many meanings and provides the reader with a great deal of charm.
Cellophane
By Marie Arana
The Dial Press, 367 pp., $24
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