ABOUT
THE BOOK

This is a novel of high ambition and great accomplishment, an astonishing work that was the “buzz book” of the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago and is currently being translated and published in a dozen countries around the world. Set in the months shortly before the 1959 Cuban revolution, the novel takes place in an enclave of Havana known only as the Island. The estate has seen better days; originally built by a wealthy, handsome couple who had immigrated to Cuba from Spain, it became a focal point of Havana society – until it was discovered that the couple were not man and wife, as had been presumed, but brother and sister.

Now vine-choked and overgrown, with vestiges of imitation-Greek statues peering from the underbrush, the Island is inhabited by a motley crew: the Barefoot Contessa (who is crazy); Casta Diva, a would-be singer, and her soldier husband, who is mute; Merengue, who earns his living selling pastries from a pushcart; Miss Berta, the pedantic school marm, and her ninety-year-old mother; Irene and her gay son; “Professor” Kingston, the aging Jamaican English teacher; a sculptor who fills the Island with his crude reproductions of classic art; the passing angel; and a mysterious stranger who appears wounded by many arrows, found wrapped in a Cuban flag.

The voices and visions – and, indeed, dreams – of all these characters alternately take the stage (sometimes changing in midscene), all telling their stories past and present, real and imagined. The result is a fascinating tour de force, a polyphonic work as akin to music as it is to writing.