Cubop City Blues
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descripción editorial
The celebrated Cuban American poet and novelist delivers “[a] haunting love letter to New York . . . with tales of love, death, and exile” (Publishers Weekly).
Pablo Medina’s Cubop City Blues fuses raw, passionate language and elegant lyricism to breathe life into a musically-disguised New York City shaped by jazz masters, refugees, and storytellers.
Our guide into Cubop City is the Storyteller, born nearly blind and shrouded in his mother’s guilt. He’s homeschooled inside his parents’ crumbling apartment with a European housekeeper, and educated through Encyclopedia Britannica, the Bible, and One Thousand and One Nights. When he’s twenty-five, his mother and father are both diagnosed with cancer, and the Storyteller alone is left to care for them. He does so by telling them stories conceived from the prolific reading that allowed his imagination to flourish despite little contact with the outside world.
Through his tales—full of magic, sorrow, longing, love—Cubop City surges colorfully to life. Moving through myriad points of view, the Storyteller imagines a world populated by both well-known figures like Chano Pozo and Jelly Roll Morton, and invented characters, most notably a mustachioed man who is stabbed by a stranger and embarks on a novel-long search for his attacker.
Molded in the cadence of Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop City Blues is a symphonic portrait of a bustling urban landscape and the intimate lives that give a city its voice.
“A kaleidoscopic depiction of life in exile.” —Leonard Lopate
“[Medina’s] most touching novel to date . . . A rich and stunning novel with an incredibly intricate scaffolding . . . Yet another triumph.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this haunting love letter to New York, poet and novelist Medina (The Cigar Roller) crafts a hybrid novel/story collection that vivifies the cityscape over many decades with tales of love, death, and exile. The central figure is a nearly blind young Cuban man living in Manhattan with his dying parents, Cuban exiles. To comfort them, he becomes "The Storyteller" of prose poems about where they left and where they live: there's the recurring character of Angel, a writer and foot fetishist, who seeks the man who stabbed him. There's Cornelia, the Storyteller's Hungarian housekeeper, who escaped the violence of postwar Europe. And other singular tales: a professor falls in love with a younger male colleague; a Cuban blackjack dealer is lured to Las Vegas; a musician takes part in the dawn of Afro-Cuban jazz. The stories are rich and accomplished, but the farther they veer from Cubop City (New York, to the narrator) the less compelling they become. Medina is best when dealing with erotic loss, and has a keen eye for the ebb and flow of desire. While the Storyteller device feels like an excuse to digress, there is beauty, suffused with a muted melancholy, in Medina's attempt to capture the rhythms of life.