PortadaGruposCharlasMásPanorama actual
Buscar en el sitio
Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.

Resultados de Google Books

Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.

Cargando...

Infinite Country

por Patricia Engel

Otros autores: Ver la sección otros autores.

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
6363336,430 (3.84)39
Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogotá.
Cargando...

Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará.

Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.

» Ver también 39 menciones

Mostrando 1-5 de 33 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
A young couple wishing to escape their own country travel to the US on tourist visas. But when the visas expire, they don’t leave. Flash forward to when their children are nearly grown. The family has become separated when one gets into trouble with the law and is deported, taking a child along. The book is written in a disjointed manner, jumping from one narrator to another and one time frame to another without a smooth transition. While feeling empathy for a family torn in two, it is hard to condone illegal behavior, ignoring immigration laws, and sneaking back into the US when legal methods don’t work. How sad for those who obey the rules and the laws! Warning: there is a scene in the very beginning of the story when a cat is tortured and murdered. As my review indicates, I did not care for the writing or the subject matter. Not recommended. ( )
  Maydacat | Jul 15, 2023 |
Very much about traumas of separation and identity, and some other traumas as well, but not so overdone or preachy or any of the other 'best-seller' traps authors fall into. There were some constructions I didn't love, but I'm glad I read it and will be loaning it to people who have struggles finding their empathy bridge. ( )
  Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
Book on CD performed by Inés del Castillo

From the book jacket: Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Columbia. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north.

My reactions:
Engle has crafted a story of immigration and emigration, of oppression and prejudice, of hopes and dreams, and of the bonds of family.

The storyline moves back and forth in time from current-day adolescent Talia, to her young parents’ first meeting and falling in love, the their struggles in the USA, how they came to be separated, and how Talia, a US born citizen, wound up in Columbia with her father rather than in New Jersey with her mother and two siblings. Engel also switches narrators, so we get snippets of the story from Talia, her mother Elena, her father Mauro, her sister Karina, and her brother Nando. We see the sacrifices made by parents for the sake of their children, but also the hurt and feelings of abandonment suffered by the children separated from a parent.

Inés del Castillo does a very fine job of narrating the audiobook. She really brought these characters to life. ( )
  BookConcierge | Jun 25, 2023 |
At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting brutality of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States.

They travel to Houston and send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself the daughter of Colombian immigrants and a dual citizen, gives voice to Mauro and Elena, as well as their children, Karina, Nando, and Talia—each one navigating a divided existence, weighing their allegiance to the past, the future, to one another, and to themselves. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality for the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred. ( )
  jepeters333 | Feb 21, 2023 |
The writing was beautiful, thoughtful & moving. I appreciated every word. However, this specific nonlinear timeline had me speed reading because I had to know what happened next. Great but frustrating ( )
  bb.reads | Feb 8, 2023 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 33 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
The prose is serpentine and exciting as it takes the scenic route to nowhere. There is a compliment in that. Her writing sets out to be majestic, and it is, like an overflowing soufflé.

The most unforgettable scenes in the novel are the intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombia’s long history of violence. Engel’s capacity to dive deep into history and folklore extends also into her narration of the life of Talia’s father and the family patriarch, Mauro.

The novel captures the romance of the immigrants’ first days in America with a visceral tenderness. Their skin darkens in the Texan sun. They see the ocean for the first time. I feel sorry for their lost youth, then angry at their gullibility.

This is a compulsively readable novel that will make you feel the oxytocin of comfort and delusion.

The ending reads like child-of-immigrant fan fiction. I’d hire Engel to ghostwrite my nightmares.
añadido por VivienneR | editarThe New York Times (Mar 5, 2021)
 
Patricia Engel’s novels don’t begin so much as they crack open. Consider the first line of the Miami writer’s 2010 debut, “Vida”: “It was the year my uncle got arrested for killing his wife, and our family was the subject of all the town gossip.” The start of 2016’s “The Veins of the Ocean” presents a man, maddened by his wife’s infidelity, who takes their toddler son to a bridge, lifts the boy “as high in the sky as he’d go” and throws him into Biscayne Bay. The child survives. The father is dead by the third page.

“Infinite Country,” Engel’s latest novel, leads with another surprising act of violence. At a reformatory in the Colombian mountains, a group of girls, “some of whom were murderers on the verge,” lure a nun into their room with cries of “Fire!,” subdue her and escape. The mastermind of this plot is 15-year-old Talia, an American born to Colombian immigrants and sentenced to the prison school after she burned a man in Bogotá with hot oil as revenge for a murdered cat.

A gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners, Engel understands that the threat of violence is a constant in people’s lives and that emotional acts of abuse can be as harmful as physical ones. In “Infinite Country,” she focuses on the psychological injury that results when families are “split as if by an ax” for political or economic reasons.

“Infinite Country” falters only when, late in the book, Engel hands over the narration to Karina and Nando in a well-intentioned if discordant gesture to bring these previously unexamined characters into the foreground. The siblings — one an American citizen, the other undocumented — have important things to say about what Karina calls “the United States of Diasporica,” but the shift in perspective and a surprise twist deflate what had been airtight storytelling.

It’s not a fatal error. Engel brings the story of Elena and Mauro, and that of Talia’s quest for freedom, to a satisfying close. And in literature, as in life, the question of citizenship, of what it means to belong to a country and to have a country belong to you, remains unresolved. “I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer,” Karina says, “or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.”
añadido por VivienneR | editarThe Washington Post (Mar 3, 2021)
 

» Añade otros autores

Nombre del autorRolTipo de autor¿Obra?Estado
Engel, Patriciaautor principaltodas las edicionesconfirmado
Castillo, Inés delNarradorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Debes iniciar sesión para editar los datos de Conocimiento Común.
Para más ayuda, consulta la página de ayuda de Conocimiento Común.
Título canónico
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Fecha de publicación original
Personas/Personajes
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Lugares importantes
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Acontecimientos importantes
Películas relacionadas
Epígrafe
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Mi patria es la tierra.
---Arturo Salcedo Martinez, Sentido de Patria
Diasporism is my mode.
---R. B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For my parents and my brother
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
It was her idea to tie up the nun.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.
Only women knew the strength it took to love men  through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.
Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance.
During the.years Elena and Mauro contemplated staying in the country and the threat of being caught and sent back, they thought only of their lives lived here or lived there, not a fractured in-between. It never occurred to them their family could be split as if by an ax.
It had been Mauro's idea to leave. Elena only followed.
How odd that in the end it was he who returned home and she who stayed.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
(Haz clic para mostrar. Atención: puede contener spoilers.)
Aviso de desambiguación
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico

Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.

Wikipedia en inglés

Ninguno

Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogotá.

No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca.

Descripción del libro
Resumen Haiku

Debates activos

Ninguno

Cubiertas populares

Enlaces rápidos

Valoración

Promedio: (3.84)
0.5
1 2
1.5
2 8
2.5 1
3 31
3.5 13
4 60
4.5 11
5 30

¿Eres tú?

Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing.

 

Acerca de | Contactar | LibraryThing.com | Privacidad/Condiciones | Ayuda/Preguntas frecuentes | Blog | Tienda | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas heredadas | Primeros reseñadores | Conocimiento común | 203,217,228 libros! | Barra superior: Siempre visible