I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring

Garcia, the author of four award-winning novels including Leaving Home, here collects autobiographical sketches recalling his childhood in rural South Texas after WWII. As in many books shaped by memory, Garcia's follows its own quixotic internal logic, emerging as a rambling, moving and at times raucously funny portrait of an extended family. From the story of how the town priest attempted to cure Uncle Matias of his prodigious swearing to the abundance of anecdotes about Grandmother Maria, the tough, eccentric clan matriarch, Garcia's family is described with much affection but little sentimentality. In the process, the author reveals rural Mexican culture in Texas of the time; from the breakfasts of chorizos, tortillas and eggs, to the unbreakable bonds of family, which envelopes Garcia's mad aunt Pepa, and even two ``Anglos''-a down-on-her-luck waitress and her placid, chain-smoking young son-driven by misfortune to rent from Garcia's grandmother. ``It was easy to laugh and cry in the dark with the stories,'' Garcia writes in his introduction. ``We never knew who would be there for the night: relatives of all shapes, mental states.... There was nothing quite so thrilling as to see a favorite storyteller approach.... I never realized until later how much of life I had covered or had covered me during those years.'' The young Garcia listened intently to those stories; readers will be glad that he did. (Sept.)