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Title: Puzzling
Review: After all the hype, and comparison to Camus' "The Stranger", I suppose my expectations were high for this book. I found "Autobiography of my Mother" completely benign. In some parts, pointless. Unlike Camus' protagonist in "The Stranger", Xuela's world-view is too fully revealed to be cleverly wrought and too self-perpetuating to cause empathy with the reader. A self-pitying character, Xuela is hard to empathize with because she decries her father and the white "conquerers" for exploiting people and destroying the aboriginal population's culture; yet, Xuela also takes advantage of many -- emotionally and psychologically. Therefore, Xuela just comes across as bitter and codependent and the reader is not compelled to sympathize with her situation. I also found nothing sensual about the book -- the author's placement of masturbation description seemed to come out of nowhere and appears simply awkward. Overally, the book does not deliver compared to the hype
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