The Cigar Roller: A Novel - Softcover

Medina, Pablo

3.3

135 ratings by Goodreads

9780802142375: The Cigar Roller: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802142370 ISBN 13: 9780802142375

Publisher: Grove Press, 2006

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Master storyteller Pablo Medina's The Cigar Roller is a radiant novel recounting the life of Cuban master cigar roller Amadeo Terra. A proud and capricious man, tobacco has been the center of Amadeo's life, the source of his passion. For his considerable talents with the leaves he had been forgiven a great number of sins. An imperious patriarch of enormous appetites, Amadeo now lies in a Florida hospital after a stroke looks back at his previously unexamined life. One day Nurse feeds him mango from a baby-food jar-a change from the tasteless mush he frequently rejects with defiance-and the taste brings memories of his life in Havana flooding back to him. He recalls his turbulent, passionate relationship with his wife Julia, his numerous romantic transgressions, the three sons he's kept at a distance, the political strife that forced his family to relocate from Cuba to Florida, and finally the tragedy that he's kept locked away. The Cigar Roller is a tour de force, an evocative, humorous and endearing and portrait of a once robust man who, at the end of his imperfect life, clamors for some dignity and grace as he comes to terms with his regrets.

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About the Author:

Pablo Medina teaches writing and literature at New School University and is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

From Publishers Weekly:

The final days of a paralyzed stroke victim provide the occasion for a poignant set of immigrant's reflections in Medina's latest. Amadeo Terra spends days and nights in his Catholic nursing home in Tampa silently raging against the neglect of his grown children and the shortcomings (and even brutality) of various staff caretakers. In between episodes of internalized anger, Terra relives his path to becoming a master cigar roller in Cuba, his emigration and work in Tampa's Ibor City cigar factories and his troubled marriage. Medina (The Return of Felix Nogarra) crafts a complex, rewarding novel out of a static setting. Passages in which Terra relives his romantic past, uses his bodily functions in retaliatory fashion or rails against the emptiness of life in Florida each have a particular texture. The darker final chapters work less well, as Medina ineffectively blurs Terra's relationship with his abusive father with ambulatory fantasies and Terra's final decline. But Medina's graceful use of the third person, into which he folds a multiplicity of perspectives with real lyricism, makes Terra seem to open outward into the world--as someone to whom things happen (in paralysis and before), but also as someone who asserts his humanity in whatever circumstances he finds himself. Medina skates perfectly between Terra's specificity and the universality of his plight, making Terra, his flaws and his struggles all the more compelling.
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