EBOOK
About
The haunting story of a daughter's struggle to confront her father's turbulent-and often violent-legacy
After a fourteen-year estrangement, Maria Venegas returns to Mexico from the United States to visit her father, who is living in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. While spending the following summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fences, he begins sharing stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence-from the final conversations he had with his own father, to his extradition from the United States for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for the first time at the age of twelve.
Written in spare, gripping prose, Bulletproof Vest is Venegas's reckoning with her father's difficult legacy. Moving between Mexico and New York, between past and present, Venegas traces her own life and her father's as, over time, a new closeness and understanding develops between them. Bulletproof Vest opens with a harrowing ambush on Venegas's father while he's driving near his home in Mexico. He survives the assault-but years later the federales will find him dead near the very same curve, and his daughter will be left with not only the stories she inherited from him but also a better understanding of the violent undercurrent that shaped her father's life as well as her own.
After a fourteen-year estrangement, Maria Venegas returns to Mexico from the United States to visit her father, who is living in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. While spending the following summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fences, he begins sharing stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence-from the final conversations he had with his own father, to his extradition from the United States for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for the first time at the age of twelve.
Written in spare, gripping prose, Bulletproof Vest is Venegas's reckoning with her father's difficult legacy. Moving between Mexico and New York, between past and present, Venegas traces her own life and her father's as, over time, a new closeness and understanding develops between them. Bulletproof Vest opens with a harrowing ambush on Venegas's father while he's driving near his home in Mexico. He survives the assault-but years later the federales will find him dead near the very same curve, and his daughter will be left with not only the stories she inherited from him but also a better understanding of the violent undercurrent that shaped her father's life as well as her own.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"[A]s amazing as that emotional honesty is, it's the brilliantly executed narrative structure -- the stubborn refusal to give in to established perceptions about the memoir -- that makes the book truly amazing. It's likely Bulletproof Vest will be taught in college classes for years to come, not just because of its brutal and heartfelt prose, but because of its technical brilliance. There are more
Michael Schaub, National Public Radio
"Through vivid prose and psychological shading, [Venegas] turns blockbuster material into a novelistic portrait of a renegade who lived his life on the border 'of what was fact and what was myth.'"
The New Yorker
"Vividly evocative... [a] love letter written across borders of time and geography from an Americanized daughter to her quintessentially Mexican father. ...Full of richly described moments... [that seem] both real and like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is a testament to Venegas's prose that we experience all this not as sensationalistic fantasy but as a way of life."
Zachary Lazar, New York Times Book Review