“How can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 29, 2013)

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled. Oscar has never actually been to Pata de Puerco (translated as Pig’s Foot) but instead relies on memories handed down over generations to paint a picture of the town and the events that eventually lead to his beaten down existence in a shantytown. Nostalgia invariably wears rose-colored glasses so it is that the small town with its slow pace of daily life casts a delightful shadow and creates a sense of longing — even if the events that transpired there were often riven by violence and vengeance.

The author Carlos Acosta, is a world-famous dancer, and in fact bears a great deal of resemblance to the polymath, Melecio, in the book, one of Oscar’s relatives. Acosta nimbly weaves threads of magic realism in his novel and the able translation makes the story come alive. The old-fashioned “once upon a time” narration dispenses with gimmicks (at least in the beginning) and makes for an arresting and page-turning read.

Acosta sets his story from the early 1800s and sprinkles peeks into the country’s history as he goes along. We get brief (very brief) glimpses into the war of independence in 1868; the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor (in 1898) all the way to more contemporary times. An occasional jab at Cuba’s political climate is thrown around: “An island the size of a sardine can’t govern itself, that one way or another it is dependent on the whale in order to thrive,” but Acosta doesn’t really stray too far from the script. Sometimes one wishes for a more intimate working of these political events into the story but perhaps Acosta’s point is precisely that political events often serve only as a backdrop against which the theater of life unfolds.

The end is intentionally ambiguous — one wonders whether it is meant to cast a shadow over the verity of the narrated events or to question the place of history in our lives. “My grandfather said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realizing how much worse things used to be,” Oscar says towards the end. It seems for all the talk of history, not much is easily remembered or its lessons at least, seem to be appropriately diluted, ready for easy consumption. It is perhaps true, Acosta seems to say in his compelling novel, that as Napoleon once said, history is but a set of lies people have agreed upon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carlos Acosta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Cuba: Adios, Happy Homeland by Ana Menendez

Bibliography:

• Pig’s Foot (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World (2008)

Related:

• The Reluctant Dancer by Margaret Willis (2011)

“Do we still know what it’s like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgetting? And this is when I think of Matias, who breached the space of the known for nothing more than a glimpse of the white-blind city on the other side.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 18, 2011)

I have seldom read such an extraordinary collection of stories, fascinating in their sheer inventiveness, subtly interlinked so that their images reflect and coruscate.* It is not entirely right to speak of stories either. Roughly half the two dozen pieces in this collection might be called stories in the normal sense, though some are no more than brief surreal hallucinations. The rest include several poems, two sets of dictionary entries, a letter and the reply to it, a news report, and a brief history of poetry in Cuba. All the pieces are ostensibly by different authors, collected by an expatriate Irishman who introduces himself in the preface and concludes with brief biographies of all the writers involved. All of course are fictional, even the author herself: “Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance.”

All this cleverness would mean little were Menéndez not able to write and have something vital to write about — but she does and she can. Listen to the ending of “Journey Back to the Seed,” as a senile Cuban woman in exile in Miami thinks slowly back to her birth on that scented island:

“And then her soul passing through a pinhole in the firmament, her thin thread-self forgetting that she had once remembered the pleasure of the body, the sound of the wind…. Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time’s shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey’s return.”

Or, at the other end of the scale, a six-year-old boy woken by his mother to set out on a long trip:

“Children are the slaves of other voices. They have not yet mastered the first person singular and are always at the blunt end of someone else’s dream.”

This story, “Cojimar,” and the two that follow her are obviously based on the 1999 story of Elián González, the sole survivor of an escape by sea from Cuba, who was eventually repatriated by the US authorities. But Menéndez shies from telling the story straight: the first tale is suspended somewhere between the uncomprehending wonder of the child and the almost mystical fears of an old fisherman. The second is a comedy set in an officeful of Miami expatriates engaged in milking the US Government. The third is a Cuban press-release.

This technique of approaching a subject from different angles and in wildly differing styles is central to the author’s method. Few of the other pieces can be tied down so clearly to an historical event. She has mostly chosen to occupy the mind of the exile as a psychic space, dreaming alternately of escape and return. Images of transport abound: flight, wings, parachutes, balloons; boats, winds, and the call of the sea; grand railroad terminals, and trains speeding through darkness that never reach their destination.

The first story, “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors,” a surreal nightmare of an old man hunted by killers in a station whose roof opens to the firmament, ends with a line that is typical of the whole: “With a great concussion of air, the train swept into the station, bearing with it the smell of the sea.” Except that there is no “typical;” Menéndez’ style keeps changing, and some of her most effective stories are barely connected to the Cuban theme at all. In “Three Betrayals,” an ordinary divorce case becomes an allegory of loss. In “The Express,” a professor commuting home from another city starts to reevaluate her life when the train hits a suicide:

“And now? Now she was whole, complete, content. She breathed and loved. She’d banished danger; but never again would she be invited to dance on its electric rim.”

Ana Menéndez is a wizard with English and a born writer. But an exile tells a life-story that has no proper ending, in a language that does not belong. There is an amusing trio of fables in the book constructed like a computer program that keeps looping back to the beginning and never ends. There is a small anthology of poems put into English by Google Translate; the original Spanish version of the first of them appears as a footnote to another story, and the differences are laughable, but soon the fractured English of the Google version develops a magic of its own. There is even a story about two Americans in the Caribbean written entirely in Spanish, with just the odd phrase of English, a pointed reversal of the way that novelists typically give local color to stories in foreign settings. I mention these things to illustrate Menéndez’ invention and variety, but I would not leave the impression that this book is merely clever and nothing more. Indeed, as I thumb through it now, I keep coming on passages that touch me again with their beauty, wonder, or sorrow. Reading this is an experience like no other.

*But then I have not read any Borges — an omission I shall soon correct — and I very much suspect his genius is in the air Menéndez breathes.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; Original edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ana Menendez
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last War

Bibliography:

• In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd (2001)
• Loving Che (2003)
• The Last War (May 2009)
• Adios, Happy Homeland (August 2011)

“Enshrined within the Colonial Spanish penal code is the Latin maxim talem qualem, which means you take your victim as you find him. American cops call it the eggshell skull rule. Slap someone with a delicate cranium, break it, and they’ll still charge you with murder. Talem qualem. Take your victim as you find him. In other words, be careful who you kill.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Guy Savage (AUG 18, 2009)

Special: Author Interview

Adrian McKinty’s latest thriller Fifty Grand begins in Wyoming on a frozen lake as a masked assailant forces a naked man at gunpoint to hammer a hole in the ice and then jump into the freezing water. Sobbing and begging for mercy, the man asks, “How did it come to this?” Then the novel goes back in time to answer that question.

Fifty Grand is narrated by female Cuban detective, Mercado. Mercado’s father defected to the U.S from Cuba years before, and while his abandoned wife is now a borderline nutjob, Mercado and her brother, Ricky never really got over the shock or the taint of their father’s defection. Now years later, Mercado learns that her father has been killed in a hit-and-run accident near Fairview, Colorado. Sketchy details that seep back to Cuba reveal that he was making a meager living as a ratcatcher. Apart from the ugly fact that Mercado’s father crawled off to die and that no one has been arrested for the crime, Mercado is also haunted by questions about her father’s desertion of his Cuban family. Since Mercado is not allowed to travel to the US from Cuba, she gets a week’s leave of absence supposedly to travel to Mexico City. But once there, Mercado takes an enormous risk and posing as an illegal immigrant, she pays her way across the border into America.

As planned, Mercado, who now goes by the name “Maria,” ends up in the wealthy ski resort of Fairview. It’s a nasty little tight-assed town owned by the corrupt Sheriff Briggs. Briggs has reason to believe that the Hollywood Scientologist crowd will make a vacation nest in Fairview and with Tom Cruise firmly in place as part of the advance landing crew, Briggs buys illegals to work the hotels and local businesses. He expects the illegals to be invisible, compliant and assist him–under threat of violence–in the upcoming economic boom.

Mercado begins working as a maid and in this capacity she sees the other side of Fairview: the cocaine, the prostitution, and the endless partying of the Hollywood crowds–those on their way up, and those on their way down. She has just a week to investigate her father’s death before she must return to Cuba, and if she fails to return, the consequences towards those she loves will be painful. Naturally since her father defected, there are those in Cuba who imagine Mercado will do the same if given the chance, but the detective sees America as some sort of racist assault course to be negotiated and barely tolerated until she discovers the truth about her father’s death.

Irish novelist McKinty isn’t that widely read in North America, but perhaps Fifty Grand will expand this author’s readership. Perhaps best known for his Forsthye trilogy (Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, The Bloomsday Dead) McKinty is a versatile novelist who appears to have slipped easily into the skin of a female Cuban detective with the result that Mercado is a dynamic, believable character from page one. Fifty Grand is weakest when we question how an illegal alien smuggled in by a coyote and sold to local law enforcement, and now in America for less than a week has the time or the energy to sniff around the rich and famous of Fairview. The fact that Mercado is apparently so unsupervised and has oodles of free time defies credibility, and this implausibility nagged at me during parts of the novel. However, that complaint aside, for the most of the novel, McKinty’s narrative is so strong, that the skepticism of “Maria’s” work demands takes a back seat to the action.

The novel creates a portrait of a troubled Cuba, a country harnessed by the restraints placed by Castro and with conflicting forces waiting in the wings to carve up the prize when Castro dies. Mercado questions Cuba’s systems and yet when she arrives in the so-called paradise of America, she’s automatically placed at the bottom of the totem pole, and is treated like trash by the wealthy whose homes she cleans. As a result, both worlds are seen as unpleasant places–poverty-stricken Cuba in limbo until Castro dies, and America with its vastly contrasting worlds of the filthy rich and the dirt poor who serve them. Fifty Grand’s strength is in its excellent, clever structure, and consequently, the novel is much more intense than many thrillers I’ve read this year. McKinty is a bold writer who isn’t afraid of handing out advance plot information as a means to tease us into the story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co. (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Adrian McKinty
EXTRAS:	Excerpt MostlyFiction interview with Adrian McKinty
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of Dead I May Well Be And other Cuban Detective novels: Comrades in Miami by Jose Latour Havana Red by Leonard Padura Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano

Bibliography:

• Orange Rhymes With Everything (1997)
• Hidden River (2004)
• Fifty Grand (2009)
• Falling Glass (2011)

Dead Trilogy:

• Dead I Well May Be (2003)
• The Dead Yard (2006)
• Bloomsday Dead (2007)

“Garrison’s eyes opened. He grinned. He was an American businessman on vacation, a real estate speculator who occasionally took a taxi to look at a piece of property. He stayed in a top hotel, ate at good restaurants, tipped a shade too heavily, drank a little too much, and didn’t speak a damned word of Spanish. Hardly an assassin, or a secret agent, or anything of the sort. They searched his room, of course, but this happened regularly in every Latin American country. It was a matter of form. Actually, it tended to reassure him, since they searched so clumsily that he knew they were not afraid of him. Otherwise, they would take pains to be more subtle.

He stood up, naked and hard-muscled, and walked to his window. He’d been careful to get a room with a window facing on the square. The square was the Plaza of the Republica, a small park surrounding the Palace of Justice. Parades with Fidel at their head made their way up a broad avenue to the plaza. Then Fidel would speak, orating wildly and magnificently from the steps of the palace. From the window Garrison could see those steps.

With the rifle properly mounted on the window ledge, he could place a bullet in Fidel’s open mouth….”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (APR 30, 2009)

From the moment Fidel Castro made the choice to wage war against the dictatorial government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and to begin the Cuban Revolution, his life was in constant jeopardy. There were the perils of guerrilla warfare in the Sierra Maestra mountains, post revolution dangers from those he deposed, civilian and military, Cuban and US, plantation owners and crime bosses, who so profited under Batista. Then there were the numerous CIA attempts to kill Castro with poison pills, toxic cigars and exploding mollusks. Rumor has it that the dictator once even volunteered to kill himself. He was joking, of course. For nearly half a century, the CIA, Cuban exiles, and heaven knows who else, have been trying to devise ways to assassinate el Presidente.

However, Lawrence Block did not know this when he wrote Killing Castro. The book was originally published by Monarch in 1961 as “Fidel Castro Assassinated.” Block used the pseudonym Lee Duncan, a moniker adopted for this novel alone.

Killing Castro is as much about the journeys, literal and figurative, of five men, as it is about an assassination. Five Americans are offered twenty thousand dollars apiece to kill Castro. That was really a lot of money back in 1961. The loot is to be collected after the fact. Every one of the five has different reasons for slipping into Cuba and risking his life to kill a man relatively unknown to them, except for the media, stories from Cuban exiles, and government statements. It is, after all, only 1961, two years into the revolution and shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. Each man’s journey, his motivations and outcome, are what is really exciting and unexpected here. All of these characters are changed by this deadly adventure.

Then one wonders who or what entity is behind the operation? Impoverished Cuban refugees could hardly have scraped together one hundred thousand dollars. So, “who was financing the assassination? Tobacco and sugar planters? Oil refiners? Batista fascists hungry to regain power? Americans unwilling to tolerate a Communist nation ninety miles offshore?”

Interspersed between the narrative are italicized chapters which provide a historical perspective on Castro and the reasons he became involved in the politics of revolution. The history of the man, his years as a student and young revolutionary, are absolutely fascinating – especially as the changes which occur in him are contrasted with those which take place in his prospective killers. However, there are occasions when the author, through the voice of the omniscient observer, makes certain points and allegations which are way too subjective for omniscience and border on editorializing. I think Block would have been more credible had he used one of his characters to express these personal political views.

I really enjoyed Killing Castro, and although it is far from the author’s best work, it certainly makes for an entertaining read.

Kudos to Hard Case Crime for making this most rare of Lawrence Block’s thrillers available.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime; Reprint edition (December 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lawrence Block
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Hope to Die (Matt Scudder series) Small Town The Burglar on the Prowl (Bernie Rhodenbarr series) Grifter’s Game (Hard Case Crime) All the Flowers are Dying (Matt Scudder series) Girl with the Long Green Heart (Hard Case Crime) Hit Parade (John Keller series) Lucky at Cards (Hard Case Crime) Hit and Run (John Keller series) A Diet of Treacle (Hard Case Crime) A Drop of the Hard Stuff (Matt Scudder series)

Bibliography:

• Coward’s Kiss (1961)
• You Could Call It Murder (Originally published as Markham) (1961)
• Deadly Honeymoon (1967)
• After the First Death (1969)
• Specialists (1969)
• Ronald Rabbit is A Dirty Old Man (1971)
• Ariel (1980)
• Code of Arms (1981)
• Random Walk (1988)
• Some Days You Get the Bear: Stories (1993)
• Ehrengraf for the Defense: Stories (1994)
• One-Night Stands: Early Stories (1999)
• Collected Mystery Stories (1999)
• The Lost Cases of Ed London (2001)
• Enough Rope: Collected Stories (2002)
• Small Town (January 2003)
• Cinderella Sims (March 2003)
• One Night Stands and Lost Weekends (November 2008)

Hard Case Crimes reprints:

• Mona (1961) (republished as Grifter’s Game in September 2004)
• The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965; reprinted November 2005)
• Lucky at Cards (originally published 1964 under a pseudonym; January 2007)
• A Diet of Treacle (originally published 196? under a pseudonym; January 2008)
• Killing Castro (originally published 196? under a pseudonym; December 2008)
• Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence (September 2011)

Matthew Scudder Mysteries

• The Sins of the Fathers (1976)
• Time to Murder and Create (1976)
• In the Midst of Death (1976)
• A Stab in the Dark (1981)
• Eight Million Ways to Die (1982)
• When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986)
• Out on the Cutting Edge (1989)
• A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990)
• A Dance At the Slaughterhouse (1991)
• A Walk Among the Tombstones (1992)
• The Devil Knows You’re Dead (1993)
• A Long Line of Dead Men (1994)
• Even the Wicked (1997)
• Everybody Dies (1998)
• Hope To Die (2001)
• All The Flowers are Dying (February 2005)
• A Drop of the Hard Stuff (May 2011)

Keller Series:

• Hit Man (1999)
• Hit List (2000)
• Hit Parade (2006)
• Hit and Run (June 2008)

Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries (reprinted 2006)

• Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977)
• The Burglar in the Closet (1978)
• The Burglar Who Like to Quote Kipling (1979)
• The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (1980)
• The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983)
• The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994)
• The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (1995)
• The Burglar in the Library (1997)
• The Burglar in the Rye (1999)
• The Burglar on the Prowl (March 2004)

Evan Tanner Mysteries (reprinted in 2007):

• The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966)
• The Cancelled Czech (1966)
• Tanner’s Twelve Swingers (1967)
• Two for Tanner (1967)
• Here Comes A Hero (1968)
• Tanner’s Tiger (1968)
• Me Tanner, You Jane (1970)
• Tanner on Ice (1998)
• The Scoreless Thai (2000)
• Tanner’s Virgin (April 2006)

Writing as Paul Kavanagh

• Such Men are Dangerous (1969)
• The Triumph of Evil (1971)
• Not Comin’ Home to You (1974)

Nonfiction:

• Writing the Novel from Plot to Plot (1979)
• Telling Lies for Fun & Profit (1981)
• Write for Your Life (1986)
• Spider, Spin Me a Web (1987)
• Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir (May 2009)

Movies from Books:

• Nightmare Honeymoon (based on Deadly Honeymoon)
• Eight Million Ways to Die (1985)
• Burglar (loosely based on The Burglar in the Closet) (1987)
• Keller (based on Hit Man)
• A Walk Among the Tombstones