Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada

Rating:
Summary: A very humorous and vivid tale
Review: I read this book in Spanish. For all of those that can read it in this language I truly recommend it. It is very hard to interpret the Cuban lingo and it looses its flavor when it is translated.

Overall this a great short novel that depicts the cruel and harsh reality that the Cuban people have gone and continue to go through.

Rating:
Summary: Super
Review: Vrlo interesantna knjiga koju bih preporucila najpre zenskoj publici. Nabijena erotikom, puna emocija ljubavi i besa. Upoznajte kako se zivi na Kubi.

Rating:
Summary: Latin Lover
Review: Zoe Valdes was born in Cuba in 1959 and fled to France in 1995. Overnight, she has vaulted to the first rank of contemporary Latin American novelists. "Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada" (Arcade Publishing: 1997) was her first novel published in English. "I Gave You All I Had" (Arcade Publishing: 1999), which existed in manuscript as early as 1995, and "My Father's Foot" (Planeta: 2002) have recently added to her reputation.

Told in the first person, "Yocandra" is a brief, rich, wrenching, serio-comic, episodic, film-influenced, belle-lettristic piece of performance art, in which the narrator's voice is, happily, always present.

Thrust out of a magic-realist Purgatory in a cycle of petition and rejection, Yocandra is confined to Castro's Cuba. A person's name may be important, but apparently not in Cuba. Yocandra exchanges one name, the name of her country, for the name of a muse in a failed effort to buy love. All of the other major characters in the book lack proper names. Her two lovers bear nicknames -- the Traitor and the Nihilist -- which reflect their relationship to the Cuban state. Like characters in a Bergman film, they meet and play a game of chess together while Yocandra suffers a spiritual crisis. Her father, a Communist Party hack, destroys a treasure trove of homoerotic art because it offends his orthodox machismo views. Her girlfriend, the Worm, escapes to Spain, where her life with a belching fat man becomes as strained as that of a character in an Almodovar film. Yocandra's lost love, the Lynx, stumbles upon a nighttime sailing expedition to Miami, willingly joins in, and alone survives a storm when he lashes himself to stray timber and floats free.

This is a Cuba in which Communist ideology and bureaucracy have bred poverty, corruption, and disconnects in the extreme. In the background of Yocandra's story, neighborhood vigilantes search excrement-strewn dumpsters for signs of political disloyalty, bicyclists who pedal to forget are branded loose women, the data entry clerk at Yocandra's literary journal creates her database anew each day when the power cuts out before she saves her work, everyone barters everything of value for what passes for food, and the sea pounds relentlessly and the sun continues hypnotically to shine.

Sex plays a prominent part in "Yocandra." (Valdes has said that, growing up fatherless and without money in Cuba, she had sex instead of toys.) Devotees of erotic fiction told from a woman's perspective may appreciate the clinical description of Yocandra's lovemaking with the Nihilist, whose perfect body includes a perfectly used thirteen-inch tool. But if the scene is erotic, it is not because there is any affection, much less love, passing between the two. Sex without love -- like literature without words, pride without accomplishment, work without labor, birth without creation -- is a staple of Yocandra's daily life in Cuba.

This is a provocative book, written with style by an author to contend with.