The Lazarus Rumba - Softcover

Mestre, Ernesto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031226352X ISBN 13: 9780312263522

Publisher: Picador USA, 2000

Synopsis

This ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she becomes the most famous dissident on the island.

About this title

Review

The Caribbean island of Cuba has, or had, a rich and multifarious storytelling culture that has survived strongest in the old songs and musical traditions still alive there. Ernesto Mestre's epic first novel The Lazarus Rumba--nearly 500 pages long--is both a lament for and a celebration of the boisterous imagination, sensuality and resourcefulness of the country from which he is an exile in the United States. The main story of his very magical realist novel is almost submerged in a prismatic sea of tales that grow more and more wildly fantastical as they progress but which always reflect Cuba's history, its culture and the cultural depredation of Fidel Castro's socialist regime. Even Castro's glorious Revolution, Mestre suggests, was a flight of fancy only rendered a reality by the cowardliness of Castro's predecessor, who escaped into exile long before he need have. It is difficult to agree with im on that point but given what happens to his main female protagonist, Alicia--who makes the point--at the hands of the revolutionary government, such denigration is understandable.

The novel concerns the struggle of Alicia and her family, living in the politically sensitive town of Guantanamo (near the American naval base) just after the Revolution, against grief, privation, continuous harassment and, for Alicia and her homosexual acrobat cousin Hector, torture and imprisonment. As the petty local government officials and malicious local police chief destroy this family and their civilised way of life, relief comes in the form of ghosts, fantastically resculpted memories, Cuba's Afro-Catholic voodoo-like religion Santeria (to which Alicia becomes an afficionado) and grotesque, scatological takes on the characters and goings-on of Guantanamo, full of magic and satirical metaphor and the twisted logic of dreams.

Cuban humour, especially nowadays under socialism, is uniquely ingenuous and double-edged and it authentically permeates Mestre's novel. Mestre also brilliantly captures the illogicality and open-endedness of life in Cuba: characters enter the narrative quite suddenly, hold centre stage for a few pages and then disappear just as abruptly. The cast of characters is itself startling: a fabulously feathered blue fighting cock called Atila who sings opera but is a typical Cuban macho; Triste the Contortionist and a host of semi-supernatural gypsy circus artistes; the police chief's drooling bullmastiff Tomas de Aquino, and Fidel Castro himself as student, friend and tyrant--to name just a few. Mestre experiments with every kind of narrative style for each of his characters, like a virtuoso violinist, and creates an intricate patchwork of tales within tales, the thread of one appearing in the weave of another, dead characters reappearing as ghosts--just as the rhythms and melodies repeat, fade and are resurrected in new forms in a traditional cuban rumba.

The narrative sometimes becomes unfocused as Mestre tries his hand at airy philosophising. He is best at storytelling: his stories constantly metamorphose into new ones and glory in the viscous magic of the imagination set free. Much of the sensual passion of the novel is homo- erotic, which is perhaps more of a reflection of the author than of Cuba but deepens the effect of an already tragic set of circumstances, as for a decade or more after the Revolution gays and lesbians were imprisoned and tortured in Socialist Cuba.

Writing with a deep-rooted Cuban sensibility, Mestre has produced a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of satirical vignettes that are both haunting and earthy to describe the soul of a complex country. --Emily Ormond

Review

"Mestre manages to interpret the magic realist tradition in his own distinctive manner . . . [His] symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing."--"The New York Times Book Review"
""The Lazarus Rumba" is a wonderful first novel . . . worthy of our best-known Latin American fabulists. With a fresh imagination and a command of the mischief words can create . . . it is Mestre's inventive extravagance that sets this book apart from others."--"The Los Angeles Times"
"A dense, complicated and rich first novel . . . thoroughly original."--"The Cleveland Plain Dealer"
"Concerns the impact of the Cuban revolution on its champions and on those who resist it. The term magic realism doesn't cover it; this is twentieth-century history as both dream and trauma. Like that other Alice, the brave Alicia Lucientes is adrift in a nightmare wonderland, this one populated by a resurrecting rooster, a bovine inamorata, as well as martyrs, terrorists and contortionists--in short, the whole proud and damned lot of us, who we are and who we hope to be . . .[It] revives our hopes that the epic novel can be lyrical, comic, and sexy as hell, and still remain unapologetically political. And why not? Cuba is a country, but it is also a family, and this family saga has the breath of history to inspire it."--Gregory Maguire author of "Wicked: The Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West"
"His prose has an uncommon exuberance that captures the lushness of his tropical setting . . . a talent to watch."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Magnificent . . . His episodic voices alternate between the vibrant and the ghostly, the gentle and the gross."--"Library Journal"
"Mestre has a baroque voice all his own that mixes fable, epic, family saga and stream-of-consciousness."--"Newsweek.com"
"The enormous influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude "on Latin American literature bears its finest fruit so far in this stunning exploration of the C

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 031226352X
• ISBN 13: 9780312263522
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512