Dreaming in Cuban

By Cristina García

Book Overview

"Impressive . . . [Cristina Garc?a's] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the 'sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,' as rhythmic as the music of Beny Mor?."-- Time Cristina Garc?a's acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country's revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is "a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez" ( The New York Times ). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel's original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban "Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose." -- The Washington Post "Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, Garc?a just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind." -- The Denver Post

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345381432
• ISBN13: 9780345381439
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Weird Book

I bought this as a read for a book club. It is very strange, I would read a few pages a day as it was so boring. I didn't finish the book and actually threw it in the trash!

Fantastic book full of imagery and glimmers of history

Garcia does an intricate weave of generation trauma through the lens of multiple individuals within a single family as well as gives readers a chance to experience how politics / religion can fracture and divide, driving wedges between various members. Her imagery and word selection brings Cuba to life in a way that only direct conversation with Cubans has ever done for me Highly recommend

The original version is the one in ENGLISH

Be warned, if you though a book with this title, and from an author with such a Latino name, had to be originally written in Spanish, you are wrong. The Spanish version is a translation, with a Spanish-from-Spain spin, rather than a Cuban touch. If you want to read the original version, you are better of with the English original "Deaming in Cuban". Even the author herself agrees, that the book looses a bit in the translation.

Imperdible

Este libro refleja la problemática cubana con una realidad impresionante, no sólo es literalmente perfecto, sino que también contiene fragmentos de la historia de la isla. Los personajes, distintos unos de otros, se debaten entre sentimientos mezclados y política. No se puede dejar de leer.

Very evocative and accurate depiction of Cuba's fate

A Cuban myself, I was deeply touched by this book when I first read it. Garcia masterly captures the inner conflicts that all her character experience when trying to find a point in this crazy family separation and bigotry. There are very subtle contrasts between the diverse forms of religions that presently coexist in Cuba; also, they play an important metaphorical element when analyzed in a political context. "El lider," as the author refers to Fidel Castro, plays a remote, mythical element, so distant, yet so tangibly close to the life of every Cuban, commanding, exerting his hypnotic power to enthral the masses in hysterical ecstacy. The story flows with ease and makes occasional transitions in time, going from the discursive moment to the past through Celia's letters, making a powerful cohesion of present past and future; attempting to find coherence in this shameful historical accident that segmented families and a whole culture in the sake of an ideology....

Realista y Surrealista

Este libro muestra muchas facetas de la vida y realidad cotidiana cubana. En una mezcla de real maravilloso Carpenteriano y un toque de Garcia Marquez la autora refleja la realidad de una familia dividida por problemas politicos, sociales y hasta culturales. Suenos realizados y suenos frustrados, amores dados y amores perdidos, secretos guardados y secretos divulgados. En realidad una obra tipicamente cubana.