The Lazarus Rumba: A Novel - Softcover

Mestre, Ernesto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031226352X ISBN 13: 9780312263522

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

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 Rumba describes 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's Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Lazarus Rumba centers 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.

About this title

From the Publisher

"Ernesto Mestre's The Lazarus Rumba 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. The Lazarus Rumba 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 inspirit it." --Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

"The Lazarus Rumba is a beautiful and profound book, its storytelling as original as its luminescent prose. Mestre's Cuba seems less a landscape than a group portrait, whose characters dance to the music of history as best they can. Yet their stories remind us that every self has its own tune thus Rumba's symphonic and instructive scope: the majesty of life for all of us resides in the details." --Linsey Abrams, Our History in New York

About the Author

Ernesto Mestre was 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 031226352X
• ISBN 13: 9780312263522
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512