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The Tortilla Curtain
The Tortilla Curtain
The Tortilla Curtain
Audiobook13 hours

The Tortilla Curtain

Written by T.C. Boyle

Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author T. Coraghessan Boyle weaves together the stories of two families in Southern California - one affluent, the other destitute. As Boyle creates a counterpoint of personal needs, civic responsibility, and social custom, each family's quest for the American Dream fuels a deep fear and anger that ultimately lead to a perilous confrontation.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 20, 2008
ISBN9781436142243
The Tortilla Curtain
Author

T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

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Reviews for The Tortilla Curtain

Rating: 4.03030303030303 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    T.C. Boyle has been one of my favorite writers since college many years ago, with his short story collection, "Descent of Man". Having read all of his subsequent works, Tortilla Curtain resonates as perhaps his finest and most enduring. Like Russell Banks's classic "Continental Drift" and the movie "Crash", it presents a crash of two cultures inexorably moving toward a tragic but inevitable convergence. Others have written here that Boyle's characters are unlikeable, stereotypical. That is true, but it makes them no less real, no less capable of arousing in us a range of emotional response and genuine interest in their outcome. As Andre Dubus did with "House of Sand and Fog", Boyle alternates between the two sets of protagonists/antagonists, revealing both their humanity and their frailties. Read this before the movie comes out.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    disappointing enigmatic ending!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    T.C. Boyle knows how to put things together. I originally really liked his short stories, and so tried this novel. Typical T.C. Boyle cleverness--although maybe a little too downward-spiraling for me. However, it is a good book.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I stopped halfway through "The Tortilla Curtain" by T.C. Boyle. The characters were too flat. The gringo with no compassion for the Mexican he hit with a car, but enough love for a dog to search all day for it when it's threatened by coyotes. The illegal immigrants living in squalor and exposed to daily violence from both Mexicans and US citizens, but determined to go on and build the American dream for themselves. I tried to push through, thinking the characters would develop past stereotypes, but at the halfway point, they never had.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just loved this book. Boyle's language was beautiful, his characters were well-drawn, the tension between the two worlds was tangible. Highly recommended. A take-your-breath-away ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really liked this book. It displayed both sides of the story: that of the illegal immigrant who just wants to work to support his family but gets criminalized in the process and that of the white American who lives in a gated community and holds assumptions that make him not as liberal as he thinks he is/should be. I would definitely recommend this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The immigration experience in California in the late 90s -- wealthy white couple who seem liberal until they feel threatened by the immigrant Mexicans, destitute Mexican couple for whom nothing goes right even though they are willing to work at anything. I thought that the whites in the book were poorly drawn and did not reflect the true diversity of opinion of immigration that surely exists, and existed then, in California.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. L A liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she a obseeeivbe realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rencon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in makeshift camp deep in the revine. And from the moment a freak acident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect om what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonderful story by an accomplished writer. This is his best.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain is not a very good book, overall. The characters, and especially the female characters, are caricatures, the plot is heavy-handed, and the symbolism is a little too obvious. It does have a few good aspects, such as the remarkable ability of Boyle to create a setting. (The only other book of his I've read also shared that strength, but also the same weaknesses.)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I first read The Tortilla Curtain as a book club selection back in the 90s. I was prompted to reread the novel when a friend laid up with a slipped disc mentioned that she had picked it up because of its local (Santa Rosa, CA) notoriety as a censorship target (a parent at a local high school attempted to get the novel removed from a required English class reading list). Although the title of the novel may sound like that of a steamy Tennessee Williams play, the book's DNA is closer to that of the Bible (there are both Fire & Flood), Steinbeck & Voltaire. Allegory & satire are its modes. Hard to miss when the characters are the Mossbachers,an affluent white couple who live in a recently walled & gated luxury subdivision perched above Topanga Canyon in LA (Delaney Mossbacher is, of course, an environmentalist who writes a nature column), and Candido & America (can't get more allegorical than that), a couple of illegal Mexican immigrants who live the most hardscrabble of existences in that same canyon while trying to get work and save money to move out before their baby (aptly named Socorro)is born. As in Voltaire's "Candide," in "the best of all possible worlds" (America the "Golden Mountain") everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong during the course of the novel. In fact, it is almost too much to bear, even though while reading one is fully cognizant that these are representative characters rather than realistic ones. The lives and fates of both families entwine in mostly catastrophic ways throughout. The ending, like that of Grapes of Wrath, comes when it seems that the worst has already happened and there is nothing left to hope for--with a gesture so humane that it must lie more deeply-seated than humankind's vile deeds portend.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had a hard time deciding what to rate this, because this is a book with flashes of brilliance and insight which ultimately I don't think works. The book follows two couples that live near each other in the outskirts of Los Angeles: one a rich white tofu-eating liberal American couple, Delaney and Kyra; the other two illegal immigrant Mexicans, Candido and America, squatting on public land.The two families first come into contact when Delaney runs over Candido in his car. Candido is able to walk away from the accident--Delaney sops his conscience by giving Candido twenty dollars. Next we follow Candido down to where he's camped out with his pregnant wife. His desperate circumstances are effectively told, and the contrast and savage irony with Delaney's assumptions (and Delaney's own lyrical nature column on the glories of staying out in the wilderness) is priceless (which earned it the two stars). There are flashes of brilliant insight like that throughout the book, when Boyle is able to hold out contemporary Americans' assumptions and prejudices to a bright satiric light that kept me reading. The book is well-paced, a page-turner, and I enjoyed Boyle's voice and style. I felt mixed about Boyle's characterization of the Mexican couple at times--feeling there's something a bit too facile and caricatured about his characterizations that depended too much on a sprinkling of Spanish and bits of cultural trivia.But what ruined this book for me were the twists and turns of plot. This book had the potential to humanize the plight of the illegal immigrant, but in the end I feel it's too easy to simply roll your eyes at Boyle's book and dismiss it because of the ridiculous pile-on of disasters. I almost put the book down twice at certain events and the conclusion made me want to throw the book against the wall.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Here is a book that I feel I could read several times and still not get all of the many layers and themes it encompasses. It is the tale of 2 families, one affluent and White, one extremely poor and Mexican, and how their lives mixed.

    Emotionally, it is a difficult read that addresses issues of homelessness, poverty, racism, rape, and other violence. It is a book I wish I could say is "total fiction", but unfortunately I cannot.

    Very worthy of your time and thoughts.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    'The coyote is not to blame - he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him…The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable.' - From Tortilla Curtain, pages 214-215 -T.C. Boyle has created a novel about social injustice which is stunning in its simple yet eloquent language. Two couples inhabit the land just outside of the urban jungle of Los Angeles…Kyra and Delaney, wealthy and comfortable within the confines of their gated community, and Candido and America, illegal immigrants struggling to find a better life far from their native Mexico. Boyle crafts these characters carefully, contrasting the vast gulf between the wealthy and the poor.'He and Kyra had a lot in common, not only temperamentally, but in terms of their beliefs and ideals too - that was what had attracted them to each other in the first place. They were both perfectionists, for one thing. They abhorred clutter. They were joggers, nonsmokers, social drinkers, and if not full-blown vegetarians, people who were conscious of their intake of animal fats. Their memberships included the Sierra Club, Save the Children, the National Wildlife Federation and the Democratic Party. They preferred the contemporary look to Early American or kitsch. In religious matters, they were agnostic.' -From Tortilla Curtain, page 34-'After a week and a half of living on so little that his stomach had shrunk and his pants were down around his hips, the effect of all that abundance was devastating. There was no smell of food here, no hint of the rich stew of odors you'd find in a Mexican market - these people sanitized their groceries just as they sanitized their kitchens and toilets and drove the life from everything, imprisoning their produce in jars and cans and plastic pouches, wrapping their meat and even their fish in cellophane - and yet still the sight and proximity of all those comestibles made his knees go weak again.' - From Tortilla Curtain, pages 122-123 -Boyle's novel reveals the harsh realities of survival among desperate people. Simple things, like a roof over one's head or food in one's belly, become pivot points upon which this story turns. I found myself wondering, what would I be willing to do when faced with wretched circumstances or the simple fact of starvation?Churning through the novel are questions about the political quagmire of illegal immigration. Boyle deftly reveals the human side to the immigration issues, forcing the reader to grapple with this problem and wonder about the solutions. Might illegal immigration be merely a symptom of a larger, more difficult problem?When Delaney's ordered world intersects with Candida's, the normally liberal minded Delaney is forced to address his own racism.'"…Well did you ever stop to think what happens when they don't get that half-day job spreading manure or stripping shingles off a roof? Where do you think they sleep? What do you think they eat? What would you do in their place?" Jack, ever calm, ever prepared, ever cynical, drew himself up and pointed an admonishing finger. "Don't act surprised, because this is only the beginning. We're under siege here - and there's going to be a backlash. People are fed up with it. Even you. You're fed up with it too, admit it."' -From Tortilla Curtain, page 146 -Boyle uses symbolism skillfully, employing the natural landscape as a backdrop to the conflicts between the characters. The desolate country haunted by wild and evasive coyotes conjures up a world of fear where survival of the fittest becomes the law of the land. At times deeply disturbing, Tortilla Curtain ultimately leaves the reader with a shadow of hope.Recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Written twenty years ago, you'd never know it in 2017. The title refers to the vast divide between Mexican migrants and the wealthy canyon dwellers of LA. Factor in coyotes, the animal kind, and you've got a brutal conflict where nobody except the predators win. Two families, the homeless Candido and his pregnant girlfriend America, and the realtor Kyra and her hiking writer husband Delaney, clash in a battle for survival and for turf. For the Mexicans, it's a futile search or work, food, shelter. For the wealthy Americans, it's a losing struggle to maintain their liberal ideals. For all, luck runs out as Mother Nature enjoins the battle. This is a brutal but necessary novel with a surprising, non-conclusive ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Separate, yet closely intertwined tale of an upper middle class yuppie family and a recently immigrated couple from Mexico in the country illegally. Boyle does a fabulous job of showing his middle class readers what the other side of the economic divide looks like. But for me, the big eye opener in this book was how illegal immigration opens up the immigrant to all sorts of criminal victimization and prevents them from seeking any protection or redress. Really adds urgency to the current immigration debate. The book is ultimately a challenging read because Boyle is unrelenting in his willingness to move the story forward without sparing the suffering of the main characters. Dont read this one if you are looking for a happy ending.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was disappointed with this book because two people raved about it. Maybe it is because I work with people who live in similarly poor conditions and I'm too familiar with the situations presented in the book to be shocked.The plot was boring and I kept reading it only to see if it got better. The last page came with nothing in sight.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I never miss a Boyle novel, I've read them all and this one is my favorite. It delves deeply and compassionately into each character. Boyle is so witty, his writing so fresh and lyrical. Plus I always learn new words from him; he doesn't shirk the unusual word choice. I recommended this book to my mother, who tends to be a bit of a bigot where Mexican-Americans are concerned, and she actually "got it." What higher praise can there be?oh, and if you like readings, there isn't an author on the planet who is better at them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent read. Very skillfully addresses the inadvertent hypocrisy of the American middle class and in this case, the eco movement. The protagonist doesn't even realise that he's treating people worse than animals.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    T. C. Boyle reminds me of a kid on the playground taunting, "made ya look." He's an emotional hijacker; he can make you look through any character's eyes at unpleasant, ironic human realities that we'd all prefer to forget. In The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle is at the top of his perspective-shifting, biting-black-humor game. This time Boyle is riffing on the immigration issue in suburban Los Angeles, making the reader look through the eyes of Mexican illegal immigrants, and then through the eyes of wealthy Californians. "Nature red in tooth and claw" is ever-present, lurking around the edges, seeking whom she may devour.

    What really separates humans? Boyle forces us to address this question. Is it wealth? Race? Nationality? The luck of the draw? Work ethic? Our perception of what constitutes the "good life"? And what about the division between decent people and cold-blooded violent psychos of whatever background? Ultimately, you conclude, everybody is just trying to survive within a very chaotic, crazy-funny, heartbreakingly tragic universe. Boyle is America's Dickens and Wilde rolled into one, and this novel is genius. I recommend it with one caveat: don't go into the California desert with Boyle unless you really want him to make ya look.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The usual modern novel, but I remember it because the subject matter was Latino housekeepers and immigrants vs. the white elite etc. ON that basis it was interesting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Written in Steinbeckian style a story of the barrier between tortilla and bread eaters. There are good and bad people on both sides. A must read for all living in borderline states.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    recommended for: those who are willing to question their outlook on life & their opinions about other peopleWell, even though I am not ignorant about immigration issues, this book made me more aware, and it encouraged me to be thoughtful, so I liked it for that. I liked the writing style and enjoyed most of the story.I wasn’t wild about some of the events that happened toward the end of the book: I thought they were heavy handed and unnecessary; it was the slice of life events that I found most interesting and I didn’t need any big “blockbuster” events.Rife with symbolism and commentary on various topics & themes: most especially America’s illegal immigration and Mexico’s dire poverty problems, but also: coyotes & nature/desperate Mexican immigrants/affluent white southern Californians; different kinds of prisons; the drive for survival; nature & human nature; the presence or absence of safety; inequities: have and have-nots human beings; etc. I haven’t uttered the phrase “it isn’t fair” since I was seven because I’m acutely aware that nothing about life is fair. But, I felt somewhat depressed and despairing when reading this book. Maybe that was part of the point. I do live in California, and I’ve known people from both “sides” of the human condition presented here, and plenty of those (like me) who are in-between the two extremes. I do appreciate that there wasn’t an attempt to give any easy answers regarding illegal immigration.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An accident knocks two men off their intended courses - their normal, quiet lives; their individual attempts at happiness. The white man begins to doubt his relationships with his wife and friends, his own values, even his life's work is affected. The immigrant is injured, unable to work, and must rely on his pregnant, teenage wife to care for him and earn money. Neither man can comprehend the other's situation, and so they find themselves at war with one another's culture and society (and their own). Both see each other as the problem and seem to want the other to understand them in the most basic way, but neither will bend to sympathize.I can't believe this book was written in the 90's - it's so relevant for today, so expressive of our culture now. I know my feelings on immigration issues have swung from one side to the other - it can be hard to keep a clear head about borders in a border state. This is an important story, very well written, that should be recommended reading for mature high schoolers or anyone older.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A great, timeless story, a compelling narrative, and poorly-drawn, cliched characters that walked out of a soap opera or, even worse, a cartoon. What Tolstoy could have done with this one!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was delightfully surprised to find how similar this book was to The Grapes of Wrath. I know I should not be comparing books like that, but one cannot help oneself when the author introduced the book with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath before the novel even began. With that said, I believe The Tortilla Curtain would have been more depressing for me if it were not for Boyle's ironic style. His ability to make a downright depressing scene somewhat laughable is really quite fascinating to me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Audiobook performed by the author

    Two Mexicans – America and Candido Rincon – are barely surviving in a makeshift camp in the canyons on the outskirts of Los Angeles. In contrast, Kyra and Delaney Mossbacher live in a gated community at the top of Topanga Canyon; he writes environmental articles, and she is an aggressive realtor. A freak accident connects these two couples.

    I confess this went in a direction I wasn’t expecting. Somehow I thought there would be much more connection between the couples, instead I got two almost parallel story lines, which occasionally touched. I was initially quite sympathetic to the plight of Candido and America, but midway through lost much of my sympathy for them, only to regain it at the very end. It’s hard to look directly in the face of such abject poverty, such desperation, and not feel some impulse to help.

    I never connected with Kyra. Boyle didn’t give us much beside a driven, career-minded woman who would step on anyone without so much as a glance in order to succeed. Her single-mindedness and narrow focus made me want to shake her.

    Delaney was somewhat more sympathetic, until he began to rant towards the end. At first, I really thought he would find a way to help the Rincons, but it became clear quite quickly that he was only concerned about the inconvenience the accident presented. His only mission, it seemed, was to preserve the natural environment for his own use – so he could hike in peace through the hills observing nature (but God forbid, a coyote would come into his yard!). He became a sort of caricature. His total disregard of specific evidence in the closing chapters made me afraid for both the Rincons and for Delaney, himself.

    In the end I’m puzzled as to what Boyle was trying to achieve. There are so many themes here from the abuse of the environment for the sake of development, to the harsh realities of immigrants’ lives (the abject poverty and subsistence living, their naiveté and the ease with which they are taken advantage of, their total powerlessness), to the resilience of the human spirit, to the obsessive desire to wall out anyone who is different. There’s much to think about, and it remains current and topical 20 years after it was first published.

    T C Boyle narrates the audio book and does a credible job. He has good pacing and is particularly good when a character is expressing outrage or frustration. His Spanish pronunciation is accurate, as well. I did find his voice a little nasal and flat – especially when voicing the Mexicans. That’s really a small quibble, though.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Finishing this book, I immediately wanted to recommend it for book club because I can't stop talking about it. Written in 1995 and read in 2015, the theme and details are still relevant and the voices scream truth. The lives of two dichotomous families - an affluent established American family and an extremely impoverished Mexican family recently migrated to America illegally - cross, run parallel and evolve attitudes and stereotypes. The same emotions and struggles are experienced by both and yet the definition and depths of their losses and gains couldn't be more opposite.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a book club selection. This was the first Boyle book I read. It was significant since I was working with migrant workers at the time and it really changed my attitudes towards them. This is the classic "rich person on the hill vs. poor person living in the ravine".
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you are interested in reading a novel that really speaks to social issues of the moment, then, The Tortilla Curtain, is the perfect book for you. It highlights the issues of immigration and assimilation into the U.S. as a country and a culture. It is a great read, realistic and gripping, you will really feel for the characters and their plight.