The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

Overview

"A literary triumph." —NBC News
A love story steeped in political satire, poetry, and the lightest touches of magical realism, Medina has created a bold, funny narrative with an uncanny heroine at its core: Elena of Piedra Negra, Cuba.
Piedra Negra is an isolated village, whose citizens consist mainly of soldiers injured in the revolution who pass the time drinking a firewater so intense, all hallucinate, and most never recover. The firewater distiller's daughter Elena longs to be a poet, and after a chance encounter with Daniel Arcilla, Cuba's most important poet, Elena wins a national poetry prize and leaves Piedra Negra behind for Havana.
There she encounters a population adjusting to a new way of life, post-revolution: there are spies and secret meetings, black marketeers, and censorship. Full of outlandish humor and insights into an often contradictory and kafkaesque regime, Medina brings 1960s Cuba to life through the eyes of Elena.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944700874
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	07/09/2019
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Pablo Medina is the author of eighteen books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translation, among them The Island Kingdom (poems, Hanging Loose, 2015); the novels Cubop City Blues (Grove Press, 2012) and The Cigar Roller (Grove, 2005), and the newest English version of Alejo Carpentier's seminal novel The Kingdom of This World (FSG Classics, 2017). Medina’s work has appeared in several languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and in periodicals and magazines throughout the world. He was a member of the AWP board of directors from 2002-2007, serving as president in 2005–2006. Winner of numerous awards, among them grants from the Rockefeller and Oscar B. Cintas foundations, the state arts councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the NEA, the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and others, Medina was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012. Currently, he lives in Vermont and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Editorial Reviews

"Award-winning poet, novelist, translator, memoirist, Pablo Medina is a literary magician and 'The Cuban Comedy' is his finest spell— a luminous novel of poets trying to write and love their way through a Revolution. Witty, wily and pulsing with indomitable life 'The Cuban Comedy' is an incantation— summoning an island, a lost time and that most necessary of all things: wisdom." —Junot Diaz

"Rich and surprising at every turn, the beautiful excesses—the superb inventions—of 'The Cuban Comedy' lead us step by darkening step to the ironies of survival. Commonsensical as only extravagant comedy can be, this is a wonderful book." —Joan Silber

"The Cuban Comedy is Medina's dramatic reminder that one might expect a true revolution to fill our hearts with poetry, not strangle a poet's words in her throat." —Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

"A sharp, beautifully rendered look at how political ideology can warp even the best art. At times hilarious, at times tragic, The Cuban Comedy keeps you rooting for its idealistic poet-heroine, Elena, as she navigates an impossible post-revolution Cuba. Politics may be able to crush poetry, but in this elegy, the masterful Pablo Medina reminds us again of the sanctity of intellectual freedom, no matter the costs." —Ana Menendez, author of Adios, Happy Homeland!

"Medina has written a novel in which one could lose one’s self, just as the aspiring poet, Elena, is embroiled in the chaos of one of the most compelling moments in Cuban history. The prose is classic Medina―rich, insightful, and delectable.” ―Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana

"A bleak fable that honors the poetic spirit, recognizing lyricism and metaphor as dangerous tools of defiance." —Kirkus Reviews

"In this compulsively readable and darkly absurdist novel, Medina is at his best." —Booklist

"Pablo Medina's The Cuban Comedy walks a fine line between poetry and political satire. The story is deeply immersed in post-revolution Cuba, in the crumbling country and unmet needs of its people, but poets and poetry are at its core. The blend makes for tragicomedy with a touch of Spanish; it reads like a combination of legendary Cuban comedian Guillermo Álvarez Guedes' irreverent, foul-mouthed humor and the beautiful strangeness of Alejandro Jodorowsky's prose." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
A young poet's muse is slowly stifled as the Castro regime takes power in Cuba.

If this novel by the veteran poet, novelist, and translator (The Island Kingdom, 2015, etc.) qualifies as a "comedy," it's of the most melancholy and bittersweet sort. Its hero, Elena, has grown up in a rural patch of the island, the daughter of the maker of an infamously potent firewater. Dad suggests that her budding love of poetry at 17 is the real danger, though. She's "infected with something more terminal than death," and he means it: Elena's verse for a time turns the town into sex-obsessed layabouts and catches the attention of Daniel, a mesmerizing "Bard of the Revolution" who awards her a national poetry prize. In the interior and for a time in Havana, Elena's life feels charmed and strange in ways that evoke the 1960s Latin Boom. Her father's cousin is a healer who speaks in a patois of Latin, Spanish, French, and English; she falls for a comically well-endowed man who quits his firewater habit before they marry, have a daughter, and he dies; in Havana, she's taken in by a couple that keeps a coop full of pigeons and a parrot with the fraught name of Pity. The peculiarity of the narrative becomes deliberately straightforward, though, after she marries Daniel and he falls afoul of Communist leaders and is detained by State Security. Tales of lust and exorcism and flight fade from the narrative, replaced by Elena's despair that poetry gained her only "a husband in jail and the sword of the state dangling over her." Rather than get into particulars of how everyday life changed in Cuba by the early '60s, Medina memorably conjures a stark change in atmosphere.

A bleak fable that honors the poetic spirit, recognizing lyricism and metaphor as dangerous tools of defiance.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Cynthia Farrell becomes young Elena of Piedra Negra, Cuba. The aspiring poet from the country dreams of something other than making the firewater that is her family's business. Farrell captures the dreamy possibilities of the postrevolutionary period, which is contrasted with the ugly reality of everyone spying on their neighbors. Farrell deftly handles the occasional Spanish words peppered throughout the story, giving the listening experience a musical quality. Fans of world literature will sink into this listening experience as Elena transforms from a country girl to a poet in the city. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile