FRIGID TALES

Sex is a preoccupation and, as the King of Siam would say, “a puzzlement” in this debut collection of six coy, elusive stories from a young Cuban fiction writer and translator. Recurring characters debate with themselves and others and obsess over such cruxes as a woman painter’s enthrallment by her unusually virile lover, a bisexual male dancer’s manifold charms, and the benign authority figures of French novelist Stendhal and his fictional creations and also the late gay Cuban author Virgilio Piñera (whose title was appropriated for this volume). The postmodernist mirroring and maneuvering is considerably less engaging than de Jesús and his characters appear to think.

Witty and accomplished—but thinly developed.