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The thirty-six portraits in Angeles Mastretta's Mujeres de ojos grandes, which vary from one to twelve pages in length, are arranged as a gallery of "aunts," introduced by a single narrator. The stories include single, married, and widowed women, both young and old. The memories that the female narrator collects describe her many aunts--each of whom is assigned one story--in events that took place in Mexico between the 1920s and the 1950s.
She remembers them either through direct contact or through other people's reports. The women, mostly daughters and granddaughters of Mexican revolutionaries or of European immigrants, share a certain ancient knowledge, unavailable in books, which is passed on through bedtime stories, kitchen recipes, and village gossip and transmitted from mother to daughter from one generation to the next.
Female complicity runs through all these stories of courage and decisiveness. In contrast to Eve, who was born from Adam's rib, the men depicted here seem to have been born from women's ribs. Whether these women need a man or might get along better without one, each holds a categorical opinion about the opposite sex. Their reactions to men provide the stories with a wise and somewhat...