Possessions by Carmen de Monteflores

A YOUNG WOMAN DISCOVERS HER GRANDMOTHER’S SECRET HISTORY IN THIS EXCITING NEW NOVEL

Possessions is released by author Carmen de Monteflores

Possessions tells the story of Meli and Lila, the Puerto Rican grandmother and her estranged American granddaughter. When Lila meets the feisty Josefina, a fellow graduate student at Berkeley who is proud of her Latina background, she gets inspired to contact her grandmother. Lila and Meli meet for lunch and take up where they left off fifteen years ago. As Meli begins to tell Lila the story of her life, Lila finds herself intrigued with this new side of her grandmother that she never knew.

When Meli was a young woman, she left Puerto Rico and came to the United States to study art in New York City. Despite her introverted nature, she makes a few friends during her stay there. But when she meets Lila’s grandfather, Meli marries, moves to Montana and has a child. Lila is left with more than a few questions: what happened during her time in New York to make Meli leave everything and start a new life? And more importantly, why did Lila’s mother cut off all ties with Meli?

Just as Meli and Lila are becoming close again, Meli dies unexpectedly and bequeaths all her possessions to Lila. As she digs through the endless mounds of clutter at her grandmother’s house, Lila slowly begins to discover the truth about Meli’s past. Eventually Lila confronts her mother about Meli and at the same time, Lila’s relationship with her friend Josefina undergoes an unexpected transformation.

Possessions, by author Carmen de Monteflores takes the reader on a narrative journey from Puerto Rico to New York and from Montana to northern California. Surprisingly, the more Lila learns about her grandmother’s secret history and her passion for art, the more she learns about herself and her own desires.

After inheriting her grandmother Meli’s possessions, Lila finds and entry in one of Meli’s journals. In it her grandmother writes notes about a film she plans to make in which she appears naked. This discovery propels Lila into a search through Meli’s journals, art and tapes to find out the truth about her secretive grandmother. Lila had reunited with Meli a year earlier after being questioned by her friend Josefina and Josefina’s mother, Matilde, about the mystery of Meli’s disappearance from her life. During her visits wih her grandmother, Lila had recorded Meli’s remembrances of growing up in Puerto Rico and coming to the United States. But Lila never had a chance to ask about the fifteen year absence before her grandmother died.

As Lila begins her search many other questions arise: What is the meaning of the inheritance Lila gets from her grandmother? Why did Lila’s mother, Felicia reject her own mother? Did the film get made and did it still exist? What was Meli’s connection with the filmmaker, Marcos and with the model, Elaine?. Through shifts in time and viewpoint, and through different narratives, the reader slowly discovers Meli, the introverted Puerto Rican girl, raised in a Catholic school, who is passionate about art and admires American culture. We follow her journey, accompanied by her father, Papi, to college in the U. S and later alone to New York City to art school. Although she seeks greater freedom and a life as an artist, her history and the restrictions she learned growing up haunt her and stifle her.

As the novel proceeds, the story becomes increasingly disjointed reflecting the process of Lila’s piecing together the scattered fragments of Meli’s life. Lila hears about Meli’s marriage before she learns about the events that led to it. Lila meets Carla, a former neighbor of Meli’s and discovers drawings, done by Meli at art school of a mysterious woman. Only later does she find out about Meli’s relationships with the two women. Lila reads about Marcos, a filmmaker, and Elaine, a model, and their trip to the beach with friends, much before she learns about the impact that trip has on Meli’s life. And Lila also reads about Maya Deren’s party in New York City where the filmmaker-turned-Voudun priestess presides over a ritual for Ghede the Lord of the Dead.

Played against Meli’s story is Lila’s struggle to unveil the source of her mother’s hostility towards her grandmother and to define her own life independent of Felicia. In this effort she is aided by Josefina and Matilde, who also become the catalysts for Lila’s embracing of her history, her sexuality and her understanding of Meli’s deeply spiritual roots. Eventually, Lila confronts her mother with the truth of Meli’s shame. Felicia finally reveals her pain and the reasons why she had wanted to keep Lila from Meli.

Lila pieces together her grandmother’ final secret in the account of a Halloween party Meli attends with Elaine at the art school in New York. There Meli experiences a descent into an emotional hell. The betrayal of that night leaves an indelible mark on her and she abandons painting to get married. At the end of the story both Lila and Meli arrive at their own epiphanies and their own beginnings.

This is a novel about the transformation a woman inspires in her granddaughter through the bequest of her possessions. The inheritance reveals the grandmother’s pursuit of her dreams of art in spite of shame, a rigid upbringing and cultural dislocation.

The story of Melinda and Lila spans a period of time between the late 1930s to the present and moves from Puerto Rico, the New York City, to New England, Montana and California. Meli’s odyssey and Lila’ rediscovery of it, is a sequel to my first novel, Cantando Bajito/ Singing Softly (Aunt Lute, 1989). Possessions, a work of literary fiction, is 188 pages long and has nine chapters and a short epilogue. While some Puerto Rican Spanish has been used, it is either translated or integrated into the text to make the reading fluid. However, shifts in time, viewpoint and narrative deliberately create discontinuity, reflecting how the story is brought together from fragments of memory, imagination, fact and fiction. The structure of the novel also mirrors the individual and cultural dissociation of the protagonists and their attempts and failures to reach the core truths of their lives.