Lazarus Rumba [Paperback]

This extraordinarily ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes'Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumbadescribes a country beset by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales told in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig'sKiss of the Spider Woman, The Lazarus Rumbacenters around three generations of woman in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as, almost inadvertently, she becomes the most famous dissident on the island.

Ernesto Mestrewas born in Cuba in 1964. His family emigrated to Spain in 1972, and later that year to Miami, Florida. He graduate from Tulane University and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first novel.

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 Rumbais 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, terrorl£+