My Review:
I first became interested in the tumultuous history of the small island of Cuba when I took a Caribbean politics course in college. It fascinated me that an island which is so geographically close to the United States could be so very different in its political system. 33 Revolutions captures life under the Castro regime from the point-of-view of an ordinary citizen who has become disillusioned from promises of change and is trying to scratch out a bare existence.
This book is more of an ode to a an island that has been betrayed by promises of revolution than a novella. In order to capture the atmosphere is his life the author’s constant refrain throughout the writing is “like a scratched record.” His monotonous job is like a scratched record; the small and nondescript apartment he lives in alone is like a scratched record; the monotonous routine of his office where he performs minimal tasks for a government agency is like a scratched record. Guevara’s prose is lyrical and captures the frustration of citizens like this unnamed author who feel stuck and trapped:
The whole country is a scratched record (everything repeats itself: every day is a repetition of the day before, every week, month, year; and from repetition to repetitions, the sound deteriorates until all that is left is a vague, unrecognizable recollection of the original recording—the music disappears, to be replaced by an incomprehensible, gravelly murmur.)
The narrator tells us about the beginnings of the revolution in Cuba and as a result of which upheavel his well-bred mother and his ignorant peasant of a father were able to connect:
They met—or rather, bumped into each other— at one of those huge meetings where anger and fervor fused, and further encounters in various associations and assemblies ended up giving rise to an awareness that they were equal, that they had the same dreams, were part of a project that included them and made demands on them equally.
The narrator spends the rest of the novella explaining the countless ways in which this revolution failed its people and took away any spark of fervor that they once had to make their lives better. The narrator himself is brought up fully indoctrinated into the ideals of the revolution and the regime. He was the model citizen until one day when he started reading and a whole new world, one outside of Cuban Communism, opened up to him.
One of the most interesting and enlightening descriptions in the book is that of Cuban citizens using makeshift rafts and boats to try and escape the Communist regime. The author comments that boats full of people used to attempt to escape under the clandestine cover of night, but now people are brazen and openly board their skiffs in public during the day. It is an incident with a large group of young people who try to hijack a government boat in the harbor that serves as the narrator’s breaking point. He decides he can’t take the scratching of that broken record any longer and declares, “I’m not going to suppress anybody.” And with these simple words, he declares his own minor revolution and never looks back.
About the Author:
Canek Sanchez Guevara, grandson of Che Guevara, left Cuba for Mexico in 1996. He worked for many of Mexico’s most important newspapers as a columnist and correspondent, and he wrote a regular newspaper column called “Motorcycleless Diaries.” He was a measured and informed critic of the Castro regime. He died in January 2015 at the age of forty.
We are first introduced to Andres Egger in 1933 when he has had an unexplained instinct to pay a visit to his elderly neighbor, Horned Hannes. Hannes is a reclusive goatherd who lives in the same Austrian mountain village as Egger and when Egger finds the old man he is barely alive. Egger attempts to carry the goatherd on his back down the mountain but in a fit of madness due to his fever the goatherd runs off into the snow never to be seen again. Between the time that Egger loses the goatherd while carrying him down the mountain and the goatherd’s petrified body is found forty years later on a mountain ledge, we are told the story of Egger’s whole life.
Robert Seethaler was born in Vienna in 1966 and is the author of four previous novels. He also works as an actor, most recently in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth. He lives in Berlin.
Karma, comeuppance, what comes around goes around. There are many terms and phrases for the universal of idea of cause and affect. The Brother is a fast-paced, hard-hitting, short book that uses the plot structure of a western as an allegory for demonstrating the balance of good and evil in the world. The author himself has described the book as “a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco.” The plot of this book is a clever structure for the philosophical and existential ideas that the author explores. When a mysterious man, simply known as Brother, arrives in the unnamed town it is a dark and stormy day and the weather reflects the turmoil that three shady and crooked men have caused for the townspeople.
Rein Raud is the author of four books of poetry, six novels, and several collections of short fiction. He’s also a scholar in Japanese studies and has translated several works of Japanese into Estonian. One of his short pieces appeared in Best European Fiction 2015.
Máni Steinn lives on the fringes of society in 1918 in the city of Reykjavik; he has no family except for a great aunt who has taken him in, he has no friends and he is homosexual. It is very dangerous for him to be gay and if he is caught in any type of sexual act with another man he could be arrested and severely punished.
All of us deal with grief in different ways and in this short book Max Porter presents us with grief in the form of a crow. It is not a mystery why the crow is the perfect symbol of grief. Crows are oftentimes associated with bad luck or evil omens, which is appropriate this book in which the Mum dies from a strange accident. Crows are also birds of carrion which swoop down and eat the remains of decaying animals. But crows are also know for their intelligence and resilience, so what better animal to use than this bird to personify grief.
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