Cuba in 1992, the setting of this novel, is a “Special Period,” according to Fidel Castro. The Soviet Union, which has supported the island for years, has collapsed, and the country is starving. Gasoline is scarce, there are constant blackouts, meat and cheese have disappeared, and people have given up smoking so that they can go on eating. When they are lucky enough to find coffee, they dry and reuse the grounds four or five times. Still, there are principled young people like Dr. Manolo Rodriguez who believe in the Revolution and dedicate their lives to helping the poor. Though he has been offered a job which would pay him more money and provide him with some “perks,” he prefers to stay at the clinic he has set up for the poor in the basement of the building where he lives in a one-room attic apartment. Though the novel is gritty, it is no political screed. Arellano has chosen instead to provide a thoughtful look at a dark period, emphasizing the resilience of the Cuban people and their hopes for a better future.
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It is 1897, and a motley group of British functionaries is running a concessionary station, only marginally successful, in Ukassa Falls in the Congo Free State, trading and exploring, mapping new areas of the country for further exploration, and using natives to strip minerals from quarries. Individually, however, their primary mission is protecting themselves and their jobs, while keeping an eye on a more lucrative Belgian enterprise across the river and on the slave-trader Hammad, who fancies himself the potential emperor of a future, native-run country. When gunfire signals the arrival of an unexpected visitor, Capt. James Frasier hopes it means the return to British jurisdiction of his friend, Nicholas Frere, who, missing for 51 days in the wilderness, is now in Belgian custody, awaiting trial for killing a native child.
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Jerome Battle, who describes himself as an “average American guido,” has managed to live most of his sixty years “above it all,” never quite engaging with those around him or becoming truly intimate. On weekends he is aloft in his small plane, his “private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too,” flying alone around Long Island. Unfortunately, Jerry also lives his personal life the way he flies his plane, as if he’s seeing it from a great distance. Slowly, inexorably, the author develops the family’s crises until they finally force themselves onto Jerry’s personal radar screen. A couple of emergencies, he finally realizes, “are new instructions from above (or below or beyond), telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn, that I cannot keep marking this middle distance.”
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What a thrill to read a novel by a first time author so skilled and so committed to his subject that he can reject all the conventions and still get his surprising book published–receiving rave reviews on two continents in the process! Creatively daring, completely unconventional, and successful! Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award, 1999.
Miller sets the book in the eighteenth century and begins with a graphic autopsy of the main character. Here he recreates the philosophical and scientific attitudes of the period, attitudes which are alien to our own, and which he will explore as a subtext throughout the book. c
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