Ferre, Rosario

New York. 1998. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374146381. 340 pages. hardcover. JACKET ART BY JOHN MARTINEZ. JACKET DESIGN BY SUSAN MITCHELL. AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY MARION ETTLINGER. keywords: Literature Translated Puerto Rico Caribbean Women. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS, National Book Award finalist Rosario FerrE tells the story of two families whose lives, loves, and steamy intrigues coincided with the demise of Puerto Rico's plantation society and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Elvira Vernet comes from a male-dominated family of merchants living in the Puerto Rican town of La Concordia. Her father, Santiago Vernet, and his four sons help transform Puerto Rico from a bucolic island where hunger is a part of the landscape into a bustling industrial society with all of its contradictions and attendant ills. Handsome, eloquent, and enormously successful, he can't help but charm his only daughter. Yet, in understanding her obsession with her father, Elvira must first come to terms with her mother, who died many years before, and whose family, the Rivas de Santillanas, had roots in an old plantation culture that could not survive the era of mechanization. ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS is an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters, and it is also the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean. Lush, vibrant, and disarmingly funny, Eccentric Neighborhoods confirms Rosario FerrE's reputation as one of the most colorful and captivating novelists in the Latin American tradition. inventory #32699 ISBN: 0374146381.