“now, when i say chiffon, i do mean polyester”
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's Catalina is 5.4 x 8 x 0.8 inches & 199 pages.
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There are some words totally hijacked for me because of song lyrics and one of those words is “Catalina” and the song is “Lovely Sewer” by Yves Tumor:
You’re still a friend of mine, we met on Chapman, in Catalina
And you're always so fly, but you can't start a war just for the feeling
In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's slender novel Catalina, the protagonist Catalina Ituralde moves with the scuzzy-reverb-glamour of an Yves Tumor’s song and she absolutely would start a war just for the feeling:
Catalina is an undocumented Ecuadorian-born Harvard scholarship student with a ferocious, semi-self-destructive wit. (A few years ago I read Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2020 nonfiction collection, The Undocumented Americans, which functions a bit like a companion piece for this novel.) Catalina causes various ruckuses at literary magazines and old boys’ clubs. Harvard gets thoroughly torn to shreds in the process:
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I loved this book as much as this book hates Harvard. It’s a lot a lot.
I’d follow Catalina everywhere, but hanging with her during freshman year, as she remakes her personality, resents remaking her personality, loves remaking her personality, was a prickly and moving joy—and the novel has a striking, satisfying conclusion. But also, I want a sequel.
Read the most gorgeous copy of Maurice last month, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall (I wrote about his illustrations for his book with Seán Hewitt: 300,000 Kisses). I love reading an illustrated book!! I demand more!
Back to using Kalamata olives in dirty martinis and they turn the most gorgeous whisper of a light silky purple.
Also, I published a couple articles in the past few weeks: a profile of a memoirist & art world glamour-puss for the New York Times and an article about community-bereft community-oriented Google Groups for Slate.