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San Juan : memoir of a city / Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá ; translated by Peter Grandbois ; foreword by Antonio Skármeta.

By: Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Original language: Spanish Series: Americas (Madison, Wis.)Publication details: Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, c2007.Description: xvii, 167 p. : maps ; 23 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0299203743 (pbk. : alk. paper)
  • 9780299203740 (pbk. : alk. paper)
  • 0299203700 (cloth : alk. paper)
  • 9780299203702 (cloth : alk. paper)
Uniform titles:
  • San Juan, ciudad soñada. English
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 917.2951 JUL 23  007567
LOC classification:
  • F1981.S2 R56913 2007
Summary: San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodríguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in English for the first time--Rodríguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.
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Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore 917.2951 JUL 007567 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 007567

Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-167).

San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodríguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in English for the first time--Rodríguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

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