The Lazarus Rumba

Description

This extraordinarily ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro’s revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumba describes a country beset by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales told in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of woman in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as, almost inadvertently, she becomes the most famous dissident on the island.

“Mestre manages to interpret the magic realist tradition in his own distinctive manner . . . [His] symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing.” —The New York Times Book Review“The Lazarus Rumba is a wonderful first novel . . . worthy of our best-known Latin American fabulists. With a fresh imagination and a command of the mischief words can create . . . it is Mestre’s inventive extravagance that sets this book apart from others.” —The Los Angeles Times“A dense, complicated and rich first novel . . . thoroughly original.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer“Concerns the impact of the Cuban revolution on its champions and on those who resist it. The term magic realism doesn’t cover it; this is twentieth-century history as both dream and trauma. Like that other Alice, the brave Alicia Lucientes is adrift in a nightmare wonderland, this one populated by a resurrecting rooster, a bovine inamorata, as well as martyrs, terrorists and contortionists–in short, the whole proud and damned lot of us, who we are and who we hope to be . . .[It] revives our hopes that the epic novel can be lyrical, comic, and sexy as hell, and still remain unapologetically political. And why not? Cuba is a country, but it is also a family, and this family saga has the breath of history to inspire it.” —Gregory Maguire author of Wicked: The Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West“His prose has an uncommon exuberance that captures the lushness of his tropical setting . . . a talent to watch.” —Publishers Weekly“Magnificent . . . His episodic voices alternate between the vibrant and the ghostly, the gentle and the gross.” —Library Journal“Mestre has a baroque voice all his own that mixes fable, epic, family saga and stream-of-consciousness.” —Newsweek.com“The enormous influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on Latin American literature bears its finest fruit so far in this stunning exploration of the Castro Revolution’s roots, character, and consequences.” —Kirkus Reviews

Ernesto Mestre was born in Cuba in 1964. His family emigrated to Spain in 1972, and later that year to Miami, Florida. He graduate from Tulane University and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first novel.

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