I GAVE YOU ALL I HAD

I Gave You All I Had ($24.95; Nov.; 256 pp.;1-55970-477-2): A wonderful second novel from the Cuban-born author of Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada (1997) builds an impressive picture of Havana before, during, and in the wake of the Castro Revolution, while telling the exuberant story of former country girl Cuca Martinez’s riotous life and loves. Teenaged Cuca’s fixation on suave, seductive Juan Perez (the only “Uan” for her) somehow survives his vaguely criminal associations, their (consequent) 30-year separation, and even “Uan’s” canny manipulation of Cuca in a scam involving Cuba’s invisible crimelords. ValdÇs plays ingenious metafictional tricks with her loquacious narrator (who is, and isn’t, its heroine, and who keeps bursting in on the action, to high comic effect), and portrays the story’s deliciously observed characters (including Cuca’s surrogate mothers in the wicked city, a pair of hilariously feisty whores, and also her militantly Communist daughter Maria Regla) with infectious warmth and energy. Fidel probably won’t be amused, but the rest of ValdÇs’s readers are in for a treat.