Cages
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Acevedo has written the impossible: an Odyssey for the Cuban 20th century.”—Junot Diaz
A sweeping, choral portrait of a man as seen through the eyes of those who loved him, feared him, and were betrayed by him.
Cages is the story of Felix—a zookeeper in Cuba during the time of the missile crisis, an exile in swinging sixties London, and finally a dying man in 1980s AIDS-era Miami. In this daring novel, Acevedo’s most personal and heartfelt to date, the fragments of Felix’s story are put together like pieces of a puzzle by one who knew him mostly as an absence.
Cuba, 1963. Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with a co-worker. In a society where homosexuality is branded “counterrevolutionary,” their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, treachery, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix’s own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio—Anabel’s devoted brother—recounts the disintegration of Felix’s marriage and his decision to step in and protect the family Felix abandoned. From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix’s flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter born out of wedlock, each vivid character gives us a different version of Felix, and the result is a dazzling mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation.
Spanning Havana, London, and Miami over a thirty-year arc, Cages explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This illuminating novel from Acevedo (The Distant Marvels) documents the tormented life of a gentle zookeeper in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Homosexuality is considered counterrevolutionary by Castro's regime, and punishable by imprisonment or confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Felix, a zookeeper in Havana carrying on a secret love affair with his male coworker, Réne, grows anxious from these threats as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he flees with his wife, Anabél, and their daughter, Eva, to London, having landed a job at a zoo there. Acevedo tells the story from the alternating perspectives of Felix's loved ones, including Anabél, Réne, and more. By the 1980s, he's living in Miami and has AIDS, and Eva wants to know her father's story before he dies. What emerges is a picture of a complicated man, fueled by rage, shame, and self-doubt, terrorized and then banished by his own giant of a father and an unsympathetic government. In one episode, Felix develops a special affinity for the rare white lioness he accompanies to the Zoological Society of London, and the author shows how the cages of the title are both literal and metaphorical, representing homophobia, heteronormative marriage, and authoritarianism. It's a mournful and impactful story of displacement.
