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Dreaming
in Cuban By Cristina Garcia
This book tells the stories of Celia Almeida, Jorge del Pino and their
children and grandchildren: their life, loves, insanities, thoughts and
perceptions, outlandish acts and hallucinations.
As vivid a picture as Cristina Garcia painted, and she's an impossibly
good writer, I still found I couldn't completely connect with many of
the family members, although I plainly saw their interior mental lives
and their trajectories through the world. Was it the Cuban revolution
that fractured and fragmented them so? Or is their life and their generation
too far from mine? I felt I understood the youngest granddaughter, Pilar
Puente, the best, but then I've always understood artists a little bit
better.
Dreaming in Cuban doesn't seem like a novel. In its events, in what people
saw and thought, and in the writing itself, surprise after surprise builds
a strange tale, dramatic and true. Here's a sample, from page 42, where
Celia is thinking of her lover who left her and never came back.
"Celia wished for a boy, a son who could make his way in
the world. If she had a son, she would leave Jorge and sail to Spain,
to Granada. She would dance flamenco, her skirts whipping a thousand crimson
lights. Her hands would be hummingbirds of hard black sounds, her feet
supple against the floorboards of the night. She would drink whiskey with
tourists, embroider histories flagrant with peril, stride through the
darkness with nothing but a tambourine and too many carnations. One night,
Gustavo Siernra de Armas would enter her club, walk onstage, and kiss
her deeply to violent guitars."
If I had read Dreaming in Cuban before, I would have known to read it
sooner. A silly thing to say, I know, but don't wait. Lay your head down
at www.amazon.com, drift off in reveries, and before you fall asleep,
start Dreaming
in Cuban
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