Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina Garcia
1993
272 pages

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Ooopsie, I almost forgot to tell my best buds at the FTC that I bought this one. As usual. Maybe I need a referral to Book Buyers Anonymous…can you guys help?

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After I finished this book I read that the author is also a poet. Which totally makes sense to me. Because I don’t understand most poetry, and I certainly didn’t understand most of this book.

It started off promising. It’s set in Cuba and it has touches of magical realism. And since I love to be transported to other places and sometimes enjoy having to suspend reality for a book, I was intrigued. But I never connected to the characters, and I just never grasped the point. And hey, I found I’m not the only one who feels that way. Here’s a Kirkus Review (as found on amazon.com) that pretty much sums up my feelings:

A patchwork of incident, memory, letters, dreams and visions provides glimpses of a Cuban family at home and in exile in the ’70′s and ’80′s, but Garcia’s debut suffers from its fragmented style. From disparate times, places, and (mostly female) points-of- view, Garcia reveals the circumstances and inner lives of various members of the del Pino family. Widowed matriarch Celia–who loved and lost a Spaniard, then married and went crazy–still lives near Havana, fulfilled at last by her active participation in Communist activities and quasi-erotic loyalty to El L¡der, Fidel Castro. Daughter Felicia–who talks like a Garc¡a Lorca poem–suffers episodes of violent insanity and amnesia, then seeks healing through the African-derived religion Santer¡a. Meanwhile, Felicia’s twin daughters repudiate her while her son Ivanito becomes a mama’s boy. Celia’s son Javier works in Czechoslovakia. Daughter Lourdes fled Cuba with her husband, opened the Yankee Doodle Bakery in Brooklyn, and thrives on American life, quickly embracing cold weather, capitalism, and prejudice. Her father, Jorge (Celia’s husband), who died in New York following cancer treatment, continues to manifest himself to her. Lourdes’s artistic daughter Pilar paints a scandalous punk Statue of Liberty and has psychic conversations with Celia. After a Santer¡a-inspired vision, Pilar convinces Lourdes to return to Cuba for a reunion. Garcia explores Cuban culture and illustrates the dislocations of a family, but the novel–told through interior visions rather than action–lacks sufficient freshness of insight to be consistently compelling.

So yeah, there’s a lot going on. Almost too much. Just as I started to get interested in a character, it’d be time to move on to someone else. And then when we returned to the character? They were on to something else. Usually madness. So it wasn’t a very smooth book, and I had a hard time keeping track of what ages the kids were supposed to be. Ivanito seemed to grow up awfully fast. By the end of the book I still pictured him as a small child, which didn’t really jive with what was going on in his life.

And I’ll add that I totally didn’t get the ending. Why did Ivanito leave Cuba? It seemed so out of character. And would Pilar stay with her grandmother? I kinda needed to know the answer to that one. And the ocean…what was up with the ocean?? Sometimes you have to hit me over the head with symbolism.

So in one word? Disappointing.

Hey! I just realized why I like the cover so much. It kind of looks like my blog header. Obviously, the cover artist has good taste.