Cellophane.

Arana, Marie (author).

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Can cellophane become an aphrodisiac and a catalyst for disaster? Only in a world as profusely and purposefully imagined as Floralinda, a paper factory deep in the cellulose-rich Amazon rain forest. Readers familiar with Arana’s fascinating memoir, American Chica (2001), will discern her clever improvisation on family history in Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, a visionary mid-twentieth-century Peruvian engineer. Armed with an encouraging prognostication, and married to resourceful Mariana, he settles his family in the jungle, builds a state-of-the-art factory and a modest church, and turns to a shaman for his own spiritual guidance. Life isn’t perfect in the isolated hacienda where Victor’s high-strung adult children fail to find happiness, but things are at least decorous until he starts manufacturing cellophane, a seemingly magical substance that somehow upsets the cosmic balance. Family secrets with serious repercussions are abruptly exposed, inappropriate lust erupts, and deadly confrontations ensue. Arana’s keenly satirical, erotic, and fabulist novel encompasses the bitter legacy of imperialism and technology’s assault on nature’s fine-tuned equilibrium. With a spectacular cast of passionate characters and a plot as lushly complex as the rain forest, Arana tells a bewitching story shaped by a profound understanding of the oneness of life.