The Island of Cundeamor
By René Vázquez DíazTranslated by David E. Davis
ISBN: 1-891270-04-4
Price: $16.00
Pages: 320
The Island of Cundeamor is an invention created by its narrator, Aunt Ula, a native of Cuba living in Miami Beach. She is writing, as well as existing in, a story full of characters living on this imaginary island: a utopian Cuba.
"Exiles from Cuba
populate the imaginary island of Cundeamor: the Cuban American
illusion of the perfect Cuba...[T]he denizens populating Díaz's
ambitious, allegorical novel obsess about their homelands, sex,
wealth, and political and romantic fidelity.... Díaz's writing
is lucid and infused with parody and sarcasm..."
--Publisher's Weekly
"This
bracingly bitter novel is set in [an] eponymous fictional
territory...where Cuban emigrants fall in and out of love and
trouble...[The] briskly sketched characters...provide many
lively moments, and make this bubbly little anatomy of
engendered machismo, feminine revolt, and measured degrees of
freedom an irreverent and thought-provoking delight."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Like a Russian doll, one story opens onto another,
and another and another; each one containing pieces of the
truth... a beautiful, entertaining, sarcastic, imaginative,
demystifying, and belligerent novel that, once finished is
put into the last empty bottle of rum and throw in into
the ocean."
--Vanguardia