About Marie Arana and Cellophane


Marie Arana is best known to writers as the gatekeeper to the heaven of a book review in a nationally syndicated newspaper. She is Editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, a position of considerable power in the literary world. When it comes to writing fiction, however, she is a late bloomer, proof positive that the novel in you can work its way out at any time.

She’s already had several successful careers and her debut novel, Cellophone, was just published this summer. Her first book, An American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, was a finalist for the PEN—Memoir Award and the National Book Award. It is the story of her experiences as a child first in Peru and later in the United States as a Peruvian transplant. Born in Peru of a Peruvian father and an American mother, in this memoir, Ms. Arana recounts her family history in both countries and the difficult task anyone has, but especially a child, in building a bridge between two cultures.

Before becoming editor of the The Washington Post Book World, Ms. Arana had a long and enviable career in book publishing as Vice president and Senior editor at both Simon & Schuster and Harcourt Brace.

“When I came from Peru to the United States at the age of ten, the only Hispanics I saw in my school corridors in New Jersey were my brother and sister. At Northwestern University, I didn’t meet one Latino student. I worked hard at becoming an American, and by the time I went abroad to graduate school (British University of Hong Kong), I considered myself more red-white-and-blue Yankee than anything else. After a long career in New York book publishing, I came to The Washington Post in 1992. To my great wonderment, drawing on my Hispanic heritage was actually something The Post encouraged me to do. I’ve been urged by the executive editor and front page features editor to write long, broad pieces about the burgeoning Hispanic middle class, Cuban immigration, the deaf world and many other issues of abiding interest and no small importance.”

In an October issue of Publishers Weekly, there was a story on the lack of support by publishing houses for book review sections like Book World. Publishers, she notes, “support their hometown book section, The New York Times Book Review” but says that review sections elsewhere get only an occasion nod in the form of advertising. Although Book World is not supported by advertising and is a losing proposition, she emphasizes, the managers of The Post, see continuing the book pages as one of the essetial obligations of newspapers.

If you love books, hers is one of the truly great jobs in America, because of the support she gets from the powers that be at her newspaper, of course, and but also because of the opportunities it presents for her. She agrees.

“I’m convinced that, as editor of Book World, I have one of the great jobs at this newspaper: I read books, review them and edit. It’s an opportunity to engage in the world of ideas, interpret that world for a great metropolitan center’s readership and rub shoulders with some of America’s most dynamic journalists along the way.”

Like her critically acclaimed memoir, Cellophane, draws heavily on the legends of her Peruvian family history to create with loving care and frequent humor a character who will be with you always if you get to know him.

Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua always knew that he would die as he was born: in a bustling metropolis surrounded by doting women, far from his paper, his trees, and the rush of a great dark river. He had come into the world on an arid coast in the prosperous city of Trujillo and would leave it on the same coast, in Lima, the teeming capital of the Spanish American continent, but his days would spool out in a greener place, in an uncharted corner of the universe, in a life marked by chance and destiny.

The enduring mystery of the desert that is Peru’s southern coast is the Nazca lines: geometric shapes and renderings, some of them kilometers long, of animals and plants scratched into the surface of the dry earth.
Like the geometric precision of the avenues of Palanque, once the capital of the sophisticated Olmec culture near the border between Mexico and Guatemala, the Nazca lines are miraculous and engender the belief that visits of a more sophisticated alien race from out of space had a hand in the phenomena.

Another theory is that indigenous Americans and their shamans drank liquids, such as peyote which sent them on soaring psychedelic trips and that the visions of the trips were later traced in lines on the ground. Certainly, to understand the culture of Latin American countries, you must first accept that magic is not a myth or just a literary tool but deeply embedded in the psyche of the people.

Although Arana’s Cellophane is set in a rain forest instead of the desert, mysticism is at the core of the culture and the protagonist’s grandiose ambitions derive in part from his own deepseated acceptance of magic, as well as frquent trips with the local shaman. Arana’s hero is an aging engineer obsessed with the magically ethereal qualities of cellophane and a burning desire to to build a cellophane factory on the banks of the Ucayali River. And he drags his family off to a savage environment where his dreams are pitted against the brutality of nature in the raw. He builds a grandiose hacienda called Floralinda (“Beautiful Flowers”) through which his patrician kinswomen float dreamily,

His paper mill is successful, rolling out ton of brown paper but Don Victor dreams of building an empire based on the precious see-through stuff, cellophane. He tries to enlist the help of the shamans, sneaking away from the Catholic women of his household, to drink a curandero’s mind-altering ayahuasca and “burst into the spirit universe.” One day, the drugs of the shamans take and has a vision with the precise dimensions of the machinery he needs in a full blown mental image. He picks up pencil and paper immediately and without even realizing what he is doing, he makes a drawing of the machinery as it has appeared to him in his vision. And he believes he is on the path to cellophane glory.

It is all an illusion of course and in the end, as we have seen with the characters drawn by such authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the magic disappears and the the desires of life are revealed as of no value, even the desire for truth, as a shaman warns him: there is only one kind of truth and it isn’t visible: “Truth is a stone, heavier than love. Only the spirits can carry it.” Pishtacos, nasty little spirits, combine with disinterested laborers, and oppressive soldiers combine forces to prevent Don Victor from making his plant a success and nature provides the final blow, swelling the river which floods the factor and washes out Don Victor’s dreams.

Through it all, Marie Arana reveals herself to be a compelling storyteller with the touch of magic in her words.
Cellophane is a treasure as a work of fiction which provides insight into an intriguing culture not readily available as a rule to American readers.

—Rosemary James, 2005-2006 edition, The Double Dealer