Dancing to "Almendra"
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
Havana, 1957. On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the Havana zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquín Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, instead finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's death and the mobster's when a secretive zookeeper whispers to him that he "knows too much." In exchange for a promise to introduce the keeper to his idol, the film star George Raft, now the host of the Capri Casino, Joaquín gets information that ensnares him in an ever-thickening plot of murder, mobsters, and, finally, love.
The love story is, of course, another mystery. Told by Yolanda, a beautiful ex-circus performer now working for the famed cabaret San Souci, it interleaves through Joaquín's underworld investigations, eventually revealing a family secret deeper even than Havana's brilliantly evoked enigmas.
In Dancing to "Almendra," Mayra Montero has created an ardent and thrilling tale of innocence lost, of Havana's secret world that is "the basis for the clamor of the city," and of the end of a violent era of fantastic characters and extravagant crimes. Based on the true history of a bewitching city and its denizens, Almendra is the latest "triumph" (Library Journal) from one of Latin America's most impassioned and intoxicating voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Montero's compelling latest (following Captain of the Sleepers) is set in Mafia-dominated Cuba in 1957, before Castro took power but during his military campaign from the hillsides. It tells the story of young journalist Joaqu n Porrata, who's investigating the murder of mob boss Umberto "Albert" Anastasia, who really was murdered in 1957. Joaquin is warned at every turn to stay away from the story, but he persists, traveling to New York and back, drawing a beating for his trouble. His hard-bitten voice alternates in the narrative with that of Yolanda, his one-armed mulatta lover, who provides a more magical realist take on the surreal Havana of the '50s. Period figures like Meyer Lansky and George Raft play pivotal roles in nicely imagined sequences about a city where charm and corruption were indivisible. But it's in the death of Joaqu n's brother, Santiago, tortured and murdered by the dictator's enforcers, that the reality of the coming revolution is brought home, making it clear that much more than a gaudy city of casinos and nightclubs is at stake. Montero blends fact and fiction with narrative aplomb: as in Graham Greene, the drama of a nation disintegrating in crisis is made very personal.
