The Cigar Roller

By Pablo Medina

Book Overview

Master storyteller Pablo Medina's The Cigar Roller is a radiant novel recounting the life of Cuban master cigar roller Amadeo Terra. A proud and capricious man, tobacco has been the center of Amadeo's life, the source of his passion. For his considerable talents with the leaves he had been forgiven a great number of sins. An imperious patriarch of enormous appetites, Amadeo now lies in a Florida hospital after a stroke looks back at his previously unexamined life. One day Nurse feeds him mango from a baby-food jar-a change from the tasteless mush he frequently rejects with defiance-and the taste brings memories of his life in Havana flooding back to him. He recalls his turbulent, passionate relationship with his wife Julia, his numerous romantic transgressions, the three sons he's kept at a distance, the political strife that forced his family to relocate from Cuba to Florida, and finally the tragedy that he's kept locked away. The Cigar Roller is a tour de force, an evocative, humorous and endearing and portrait of a once robust man who, at the end of his imperfect life, clamors for some dignity and grace as he comes to terms with his regrets.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802142370
• ISBN13: 9780802142375
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Fluid and Beauiful

Medina's novel about a Cuban exile during his last days at a nursing home is poetic and luminous in spite of the protagonist's repugnant shortcomings. Medina not only enlightens the reader on the art of cigar rolling and its importance in Cuban culture and society, he weaves a beautiful, heartbreaking tale of a life ill-lived and what truly matters.

Funny, Compelling, Poetic

Pablo Medina is a writer of elegant prose and a man of great sensibility. Like a master cigar roller who tighly rolls together a bundle of dry tobacco leaves, Medina has crafted a novel that is as powerful and pleasing as a good Cuban puro. It's amazing how this book can make you cry, both from laughter and nostalgia. Fenomenal, Pablo, como siempre.

A compelling character study.

Whereas Pablo Medina's first two novels, "The Marks of Birth" and "The Return of Felix Nogara," were panoramic, semi-satiric murals of Cuban society and the Cuban exile experience, his new book, "The Cigar Roller" is a pungently poetic miniature concentrating on one brutal, careless yet richly human character. Amadeo Terra--lover of earth--is the titular cigar roller, left paralyzed and speechless in a 1940s Tampa hospital after a massive stroke. He blinks, he drools, he defecates, he eats the tasteless mush his nurse spoon-feeds him. Then, one day, the nurse gives Amadeo a spoonful of pureed mango, and--like a debased, low-down Proust--he finds that the paradisal taste causes all the memories of his life to come tumbling back to him. In deliberately disordered but evocative detail, Medina contrasts Terra's miserable present with his rough-and-tumble past, his snatch-and-grab philosophy of life, and--at the end--the horrible secret he must finally face up to. Amadeo is often hateful, but--presented as we are with the totality of his thoughts--we hesitate to call him evil. To know is to understand, and possibly even to forgive. Amadeo's story is interlaced with the dramatic history of Cuba in the late 19th century--the Spanish occupation and native insurgency that led to the Spanish-American War--and should tantalize American readers enough to look deeper into the subject. Short and exquisitely honed, "The Cigar Roller" is a compelling character study that lingers in the memory.