Adios, Happy Homeland
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the award–winning author of In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, short stories with a magical and modern take on the idea of migration and flight.
Adios, Happy Homeland! is a collection of interlinked tales that challenge our preconceptions of storytelling. It examines the life of the Cuban writer, deconstructing and reassembling the myths that define her culture. It blends illusion with reality and explores themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape—from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self.
We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish.
With Adios, Happy Homeland!, Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fourth book (after The Last War), Men ndez brings schizophrenic bravado to an ostensible anthology of fictional Cuban poets and writers (a group to which Men ndez herself claims membership) whose works have been collected by Herberto Quain, an Irishman. In his prologue, dated 1936, Quain recounts how a childhood fascination with Cuba led him to a job at the National Library in Havana. The stories that follow speak to his editorial authority and to Cuban literature with equal parts bright humor and strained artifice. In "Cojimar," Ernesto del Camino writes about an old man and the sea in a style that will be familiar to many. In "The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish," a group of female co-workers use a self-help book to become "possibilitarians." In addition to shorts, poems, and a "Glossary of Caribbean Winds," the book includes a conflict between the authors and their editor; in an e-mail dated 1923, they question Quain's decision to unite such diverse writers under the "Cuban" banner and challenge his authority as a non-Cuban. His retort, dated 1912, hints at his ultimate goal not so much a study of Cuban authorship as a meditation on fiction: "It is you who are invented, not I." The playfulness is both annoying and admirable.
