Deft evocations of the island’s sensual promise and oppressive reality.
A sensitive fish-out-of-water narrative from a visitor to the dictatorship that history nearly forgot.
The author’s husband Nick, energy consultant for a multinational corporation, was posted to Havana in the mid-1990s for four years. Their comparative wealth and status as foreigners secured for the couple and their two children an enormous house with a staff of seven. Tattlin kept a journal of their Cuban experiences, which ranged from sunny to harrowing. She reconfigures this journal into a substantial narrative that portrays the fundamental clash between Castro’s desiccated “triumphant revolution” and the powerful lure of US-influenced multinational consumerism. Because their 40-foot container of household goods takes months to arrive, the family must contend with the diplomatic supermarket’s chronic shortages. Through Nick’s business dealings, they play host to a wide variety of Cubans, finding that communist party officials tend to eat and steal the most, while ordinary citizens resort to a baroque barter system merely to survive. This process is complicated by the Castro regime’s fluctuating stance on economic initiatives; for example, Tattlin’s finest dining occurs in paladares, semi-legal restaurants in private homes that epitomize the rift between Cubans dependent on meager state wages and those who provide services to foreigners. The author is happiest when meeting Cuba’s youthful artists, or traveling in remote regions less affected by the nascent tourist industry (“sex tourism” in particular has begun to exert a corrosive influence). Throughout, she’s attuned to the surreal, mock-1950s domestic atmosphere and the way that Cuba’s prickly international relations seem to revolve around not hurting the regime’s feelings (obviously excepting the American embargo, subject of much internal debate). Tattlin avoids the journal format’s inherent solipsism, leaving even her often chilly marital relationship unexamined, and uses the form as a generous lens upon the Cuban people, convincing the reader that after four decades under Castro they deserve an opportunity for self-determination.
Deft evocations of the island’s sensual promise and oppressive reality.Pub Date: May 17, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-349-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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