Items related to Thine Is The Kingdom
Synopsis
Reading Abilio Est+¬vez's Thine Is the Kingdom is a little like attending a cocktail party blindfolded: a million conversations are all happening at the same time and you have to work to figure out just who's talking. But this remarkable novel out of Cuba is worth the extra effort. Set in a run-down enclave of pre-Castro Havana known as the Island, the story follows the fortunes of its residents through a magical realist dreamscape of fantasy, history, life, death, love, and the weather. There is the crazy Barefoot Countess; the pastry vendor, Merengue; and the bookstore owner Rolo. There is Miss Berta who lives with her always sleeping 90-year-old mother, Dona Juana, and Irene who lives with her not-yet-out-of-the-closet gay son, Lucio. Professor Kingston, the Jamaican English teacher; Casta Diva, a would-be opera singer; Chavito, the carver of poor imitations of classical statues; Vido, the adolescent voyeur; Mercedes and her blind sister Marta who dreams of Florence--the cast is enormous and cacophonous. The book hopscotches among characters, tenses, first-, second-, and third-person narratives--often within the same paragraph--as Est+¬vez plunges us headlong into the inner thoughts, dreams, and fears of his multitude of dramatis personae:On this page it is best to use the future tense, a generally inadvisable practice. It has already been written that Chacho had gotten back from Headquarters just past four in the afternoon, and that he was the first to notice the coming storm.... The following day, after the events that will soon be narrated had taken place, Chacho will begin to talk less, and less, and less, until he decides to take to bed.... And, as it is best not to abuse this generally inadvisable tense, it is just and proper that we leave Chacho to his silence until such a time as he should reappear, as God wills it, in this narration.In less accomplished hands this hodgepodge of voices, narrative threads, and personalities might have added up to literary bedlam. But there is method in Est+¬vez's madness as the story gradually emerges; in the meantime the sheer force of his prose and sly commentary on his own inventions carry the reader through this brilliant debut by one of Cuba's best and brightest new voices. --Alix Wilber
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish
From Kirkus Reviews
The magical-realist example of Gabriel Garca Mrquez is only one of numerous literary influences to be detected (and often proudly displayed) in this exuberantly inventive first novel set in Cuba just before Castro's Revolution. The action occurs in ``the Island,'' which is in fact a secluded enclave of Havana founded by ``Godfather'' Enrique Palacio and his sister Angelique, whose incestuous love bred a monster'' child dead soon after its birth. The Island now houses several eccentric extended families, including that of Cassandra-like ``Barefoot Countess'' Helena, her black husband Merengue, and his son Chavito, a sculptor whose imitations of familiar masterpieces litter the Island; that of retired opera singer Casta Diva, her inexplicably mute husband and troubled offspring; that of the sisters Mercedes, Marta, and Melissa, all variously deprived of normal health and sexuality; that of spinster teacher Miss Berta and her bedridden nonagenarian mother Dona Juana (a pun?)these being only some of the principals. Estvez throws all together in a yeasty symbolic melodrama festooned with mysterious omens (an interminable rainstorm, a menacing stranger, a ``Wounded Boy'' evoking martyred St. Sebastianwhile, just to complicate things, there are two characters named Sebastian) and skillfully crisscrossing plot lines whose resolutions vividly demonstrate that ``Havana is the city where you comprehend, with almost maddening intensity, what it means to be ephemeral.'' In addition to his creation of a moribund microcosm ripe for overthrow, Estvez offers an amusingly self-reflexive fiction whose engaging author mischievously involves us in his creation (``If the reader has no objection, it can be five in the afternoon'') and suggests through wry parallels (the tale of ``Uncle Noel's'' ark, Mercedes' wish that she were Dostoevsky's Nastasia Filipovna) that his story is a composite of all earlier ones and he himself a reincarnation of Scheherazade and all the storytellers who followed her. Enticing literary gamesmanship from a remarkably accomplished new novelist. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherThe Harvill Press
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 1860469639
- ISBN 13 9781860469633
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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