The Fallen
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A vibrant and meticulously constructed debut novel about familial and cultural breakdown
A powerful, unsettling portrait of family life in Cuba, Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s first novel is a masterful portrayal of a society in free fall. Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him as he endures compulsory military service. Mariana, the mother, is unwell, prone to mysterious seizures, and forced to relinquish control over the household to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working as a chambermaid in a state-owned tourist hotel. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary, a die-hard Fidelista who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. As each member of the family narrates seemingly quotidian and overlapping events, they grow increasingly at odds for reasons that remain elusive to them—each of them holding and concealing their own secrets.
In meticulously charting the disintegration of a single family, The Fallen offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young. This is a startling and incisive debut by a radiant new voice in Latin American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four members of a Havana family tell the story of its collapse a generation after the Cuban Revolution in lvarez's elegant debut. The revolving cast of narrators includes Diego, a young man with violent tendencies serving compulsory military duty; Mariana, his bewildered epileptic mother; Maria, Mariana's secretive daughter; and Armando, the father of the family. As the family receives harassing phone calls ("Your husband is a communist informant... Your daughter is a pervert"), the fabric of their lives and their minds begins to fray. Armando, authoritarian and rigidly adherent to the communist party, is plagued by nightmares and alcoholism. (While drunk, he is a mournful prophet: "The future came and went, war never came, and no one noticed.") The family remembers the starvation and terror during "the difficult years" of the revolution in a series of fable-like anecdotes these fragments are especially potent displays of lvarez's eye for detail. Occasionally, verbal slippage occurs between lvarez's poetic vantage and the voices of the characters, though Wynne's translation gracefully honors the four voices of the family in startling and sharp language. lvarez's fittingly surreal gloss of insight on her characters' generational divide gives the book real power.
