Thirteen Senses Term Paper

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thirteen senses is an interesting novel that traces that lives of author's parents who it appears experience rather turbulent times yet through it all, they stayed together. It is their fifty years together that offers some valuable lesions on love and trust and on the institution of marriage. The book is based on the lives of the Villasenor couple but it reads more like a guidebook on love and marriage. The book could have been subtitled, how to make a marriage last. This is because there are some many pearls of marital wisdom interspersed in the novel that one wonders if there was anything else that the Mejicanos ever talked about apart from discussing psychology of men and women.

The book opens with the author attending the 50th wedding anniversary of his parents where the couple is asked to repeat their marriage vows. This sets the tone for the rest of the book as the author observes his parents on this auspicious occasion: " Sunlight streamed in through the large windows behind Salvador and Lupe as the priest continued his words. People's eyes filled with tears. This was a magic moment, where everyone in the room just knew that God's blessing was with them...This was the key of living between a man and a woman... after fifty years of marriage to kiss and kiss again with an open heart and soul!" The author is not certain if it was love that kept his parents together for 50 years. "Was it love? Had it ever really been love?" He believes that trust probably played a bigger role in gluing this relationship than love. "Trust, she could now see was, indeed, a very big word...maybe even larger than Love." This is because the author believes that there were so many occasions in his parent's adventurous life when her mother could have left her husband since he was engaged in a dangerous occupation.

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She could have felt betrayed and this could result in the death of what turned out to be a very strong relationship. But in those moments of despair, his mother Lupe didn't let her faith in her husband and God waver.

Rodriguez (2001) writes: "Thirteen Senses" is a powerful story of strength and love, hardship and pain. It follows the lives of Salvador and Lupe Villasenor, a young Mejicano couple living in Southern California in the 1920s. The author uses fact as the basis for some fiction, building on Salvador's and Lupe's lives to embellish their experiences. Salvador is a whiskey bootlegger who carries a gun and has no problem scaring the daylights out of his rivals in order to protect his territory. Lupe is a beautiful, God-fearing girl with her virtue intact, her morals in the church-approved place and not a clue that her betrothed brews alcohol for a living."

The two older women in the book, Margarita and Guadalupe, represent Indian wisdom that appears strange to a modern reader. However since Indian culture is certainly different from Anglo one, we need to read the book from the perspective of a Mexican Indian author. The author is clear about the differences that exist between Indian and Anglo wisdom for he treats the latter condescendingly while reveres the former. On once occasion Victor Villasenor writes, "there is no way a person can talk in English about miracles and angels without sounding, well, kind of phony or holier than thou" thus highlighting lack of richness and wisdom in Anglo culture. Western culture is again criticized when the author writes, "Listen to the priests about those matters that have to do with God, but not about women and children. What can a priest possibly know?….....

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