Sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of Cuba in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval, through the story of three generations of women in the Lucientes family.

Review

The Caribbean island of Cuba has, or had, a rich and multifarious storytelling culture that has survived strongest in the old songs and musical traditions still alive there. Ernesto Mestre's epic first novel The Lazarus Rumba--nearly 500 pages long--is both a lament for and a celebration of the boisterous imagination, sensuality and resourcefulness of the country from which he is an exile in the United States. The main story of his very magical realist novel is almost submerged in a prismatic sea of tales that grow more and more wildly fantastical as they progress but which always reflect Cuba's history, its culture and the cultural depredation of Fidel Castro's socialist regime. Even Castro's glorious Revolution, Mestre suggests, was a flight of fancy only rendered a reality by the cowardliness of Castro's predecessor, who escaped into exile long before he need have. It is difficult to agree with im on that point but given what happens to his main female protagonist, Alicia--who makes the point--at the hands of the revolutionary government, such denigration is understandable.

The novel concerns the struggle of Alicia and her family, living in the politically sensitive town of Guantanamo (near the American naval base) just after the Revolution, against grief, privation, continuous harassment and, for Alicia and her homosexual acrobat cousin Hector, torture and imprisonment. As the petty local government officials and malicious local police chief destroy this family and their civilised way of life, relief comes in the form of ghosts, fantastically resculpted memories, Cuba's Afro-Catholic voodoo-like religion Santeria (to which Alicia becomes an afficionado) and grotesque, scatological takes on the characters and goings-on of Guantanamo, full of magic and satirical metaphor and the twisted logic of dreams.

Cuban humour, especially nowadays under socialism, is uniquely ingenuous and double-edged and it authentically permeates Mestre's novel. Mestre also brilliantly captures the illogicality and open-endedness of life in Cuba: characters enter the narrative quite suddenly, hold centre stage for a few pages and then disappear just as abruptly. The cast of characters is itself startling: a fabulously feathered blue fighting cock called Atila who sings opera but is a typical Cuban macho; Triste the Contortionist and a host of semi-supernatural gypsy circus artistes; the police chief's drooling bullmastiff Tomas de Aquino, and Fidel Castro himself as student, friend and tyrant--to name just a few. Mestre experiments with every kind of narrative style for each of his characters, like a virtuoso violinist, and creates an intricate patchwork of tales within tales, the thread of one appearing in the weave of another, dead characters reappearing as ghosts--just as the rhythms and melodies repeat, fade and are resurrected in new forms in a traditional cuban rumba.

The narrative sometimes becomes unfocused as Mestre tries his hand at airy philosophising. He is best at storytelling: his stories constantly metamorphose into new ones and glory in the viscous magic of the imagination set free. Much of the sensual passion of the novel is homo- erotic, which is perhaps more of a reflection of the author than of Cuba but deepens the effect of an already tragic set of circumstances, as for a decade or more after the Revolution gays and lesbians were imprisoned and tortured in Socialist Cuba.

Writing with a deep-rooted Cuban sensibility, Mestre has produced a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of satirical vignettes that are both haunting and earthy to describe the soul of a complex country. --Emily Ormond

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