The Lady Matador's Hotel
A Novel
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award finalist Cristina García delivers a powerful and gorgeous novel about the intertwining lives of the denizens of a luxurious hotel in an unnamed Central American capital in the midst of political turmoil.
The lives of six men and women converge over the course of one week. There is a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora in town for a bull-fighting competition; an ex-guerrilla now working as a waitress in the hotel coffee shop; a Korean manufacturer with an underage mistress ensconced in the honeymoon suite; an international adoption lawyer of German descent; a colonel who committed atrocities during his country’s long civil war; and a Cuban poet who has come with his American wife to adopt a local infant. With each day, their lives become further entangled, resulting in the unexpected—the clash of histories and the pull of revenge and desire.
Cristina García’s magnificent orchestration of politics, the intimacies of daily life, and the frailty of human nature unfolds in a moving, ambitious, often comic, and unforgettable tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sensual prose softens the crushing blows that life doles out to almost every character in this latest from Garc a (Dreaming in Cuban), in which six lives cross paths in a luxury hotel somewhere in the tropics of Central America. It's a gloomy portrait of modern life, told through a series of vivid, sometimes fantastical, narrative moments. In the honeymoon suite, a Korean businessman contemplates suicide as his pregnant 15-year old mistress flits around dressed up like a harlot from a bygone era. On the rooftop, waitress and ex-guerrilla Aura Estrada sips tea with her dead brother, who warns her of the arrival of the colonel who killed him. Mart n Abe, the corpulent colonel, plots against leftists, curses the wife who's left him, and lusts after the most talked about guest in the hotel: Suki Palacios, also known as the Lady Matador. A Californian of Mexican and Japanese descent, Suki is in town to fight in the first ever Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. The sultry atmosphere, dash of the supernatural, and well-developed characters are a winning mix, and the story's many parts move with frictionless ease.
