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Telex from Cuba

Telex from Cuba

Telex from Cuba

Telex from Cuba

by Kushner, Rachel

  • Used
  • very good
  • Hardcover
Condition
Very Good
ISBN 10
141656103X
ISBN 13
9781416561033
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About This Item

Scribner Book Company, 2008. Hardcover. Very Good. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.

Synopsis

Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolutiona place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut. Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdomthree hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a childs dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around themthe mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence. In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazire, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Ral Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of yanqui revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come. At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

Reviews

On Jan 5 2009, Killswan said:
Read Rachel Kushner's first novel TELEX FROM CUBA more for the future promise of its author than for any classic unity, coherence and emphasis in its telling. The story is lush, overweight, with too many narrative voices and too many minor characters going nowhere. ***

That said, TELEX FROM CUBA brings back pre-Castro Cuba with its American-European dominated refineries, sugar plantations and U.S. Government owned nickel mining operation not far from Guantanamo. It is an historical novel as inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott's WAVERLEY. For the rise of Fidel and Raul Castro is arguably in a world-historical league with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746. The book is more strikingly an American-Cuban novel of manners in the genre pioneered by Jane Austen in EMMA. But mainly it is a series of static tableaux, some likely to stay in the memory. ***

There is Raul Castro, who looks and is generally held to be homosexual, though not by the American executive who attends his wedding. There is macho Fidel Castro who is not above slipping into ex Waffen SS Christian de La Maziere's tent and bed at night. ***

There are Southerners who work in the tropics for big corporations, either white trash or not much better. In the States they would be nobodies. In Cuba they live in fancy mansions, have access to corporate airplanes and a private rail car and generally lord it over the local people. ***

There is Papa Ernest Hemingway asking everyone, male or female, to dance Caribbean dances with him. ***

My favorite passages relate to Hemingway, Saint-John Perse, Xenophon and the retreat of the 10,000 from the highlands of today's Turkey to the sea. And how soldier of fortune La Maziere processes what the obtuse Papa had missed: Perse's "treatise on violence and loss, based on Xenophon's Anabasis" (p. 199). Later when La Maziere is in the mountains of Oriente province trying to shape up the rebel army, he contrasts Cuban laziness and self-absorption with the ancient Greek mercenaries, their discipline and joy in combat for the sake of combat. ***

In 1912 Sinclair Lewis had to write HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE and get it out of his system before he could do ELMER GANTRY in 1927. I can't wait to see what super-talented Rachel Kushner has in store for us next. I wonder if she might not rival O'Henry if she tried her hand at short stories. For her own view of herself read the interview at http://www.powells.com/ink/rachelkushner.html/. This interview convincingly explains why she transplanted her best character, French aristocrat La Maziere, into Batista's Cuba. ***

If you read this book, you will, I suspect, be simultaneously fascinated, confused, disappointed and hoping fervently for more and better very soon from Rachel Kushner. -OOO-

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Details

Bookseller
ThriftBooks US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
G141656103XI4N00
Title
Telex from Cuba
Author
Kushner, Rachel
Format/Binding
Hardcover
Book Condition
Used - Very Good
Quantity Available
1
ISBN 10
141656103X
ISBN 13
9781416561033
Publisher
Scribner Book Company
Place of Publication
New York
Date Published
2008

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