Like Allende, Garcia's writing features strong female protagonists in a machismo culture in the forms of Lourdes, Felicia, Pilar, and to a certain extent Celia. All the women of the del Pino family exhibited strength even if they were said to be crazy by outsiders. Reading a novel containing high levels of magical realism is always a joy for me, as I read fast to see what magic the author decides to employ next. Dreaming in Cuban has been a fun journey through 20th century Cuba, and I hope to read another of Garcia's books King of Cuba , which is said to feature both magical realism and cameo appearances by both members of the del Pino family and key figures in 20th century Latino culture.
As summer starts to wind down, rereading a favorite book of the magical realism genre is always a thrill as I rate Dreaming in Cuban 4 stars. View all 14 comments. DNF with about 40 pages left. Very dry narration and an uninteresting plot, sadly. TW: Sexual assault, murder, rape. View 1 comment.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is not just misery porn. It's feminist postcolonial multicultural misery porn which is somehow supposed to be better. But it isn't. It's just women being miserable because they won't get off their asses and do something about it.
Pilar, the youngest woman followed in the novel, is supposed to be the hope of the future, but she's just as bad as all the rest. All of her references to the late 70's punk scene in New York start to sound a bit too researched after a while. She name-drops all the This is not just misery porn.
Apparently Pilar never went to listen to a real underground band that never signed to a major record label. Oh, and she totally painted a picture that referenced the cover of Sex Pistol's "God Save the Queen" album cover a year before the album came out.
The hell. I liked Felicia a bit more, but I get the feeling that she was crazy simply because Great Literature requires a woman being driven crazy by her sexual desires that nice women don't have. Actually, what happens is that Felicia becomes Angel from Rent except she doesn't come back at the end and make it all better.
Once she escaped from the book she stayed gone and good for her. Lourdes is the only one who actually did have terrible things outside of her control happen to her, all it does is turn her into an evil bitch. Eventually she becomes a caricature merely to torment Pilar who can do no wrong because she's just, like, confused, man. Also Lourdes is fat , which is a horrible, horrible character flaw because fat women are gross. Again I say: What. Celia might have been interesting if she had had any character development, but alas such was not the case.
In the end she decided to follow her daughter Felicia's example and drown herself at the end of the novel. Again I say: Good for her. Oh, and in case you missed the brickbat hitting you over the head, all men are evil and the source of all evil.
Thank you and good night. View all 7 comments. What a delight to not only find an author who I'd never read before, but discover that she has many more books for me to read! I feel like I uncovered a treasure chest, a rich lush story that was so captivating that once I finished, I immediately reread it.
And the best part, I read it while on vacation in Cuba! The story follows the lives of 4 women; the grandmother who still lives in Cuba and believes in the revolution, her 2 daughters, one What a delight to not only find an author who I'd never read before, but discover that she has many more books for me to read! I've long been fascinated by Cuba. The country has a rich history with a very beautiful landscape.
When I saw that this book was a must read for anyone interested in Cuba or Cuban history I absolutely knew I had to pick it up. In all honesty I was just downright dissapointed. While Garcia's writing style isn't horrible, it is still far from great in my opinion. The sentence structure is choppy and I could tell the author had trouble conveying any coherent idea. Most of the sentences in my opinion I've long been fascinated by Cuba.
Most of the sentences in my opinion were so full of fluff and unnecessary wording. I actually wonder how any publisher could approve of this. The story alternates from the perspective of several people in a large Cuban family. When an author has so many characters, it is their duty to give each character a unique voice so the reader can differentiate them.
Garcia did not do this. At all. I had to flip back and forth several times just to remember who was speaking. A woman in her 70s should not have the same voice as a teenage boy. Side note: I've read various interviews with different authors and many of them state how they really had to work hard in order to do this so I know it can be done. Finally, the characters themselves are just so unlikable. Few of them have any redeeming qualities and because of this I just didn't care what happened to them.
So, between the horrible sentence structure, the lack of distinct voices and awful characters. Just leave this one on the shelf. View 2 comments. True to the title, this book is definitely Cuban and dreamy. The story follows three generations of Cuban women, jumping forward and backward in time, hopping back and forth between Cuba and New York, and switching between a variety of narrative styles i. This variety in time, location, style and person contributes to the dreamy ambiance, but for me it was a bit nightmarish.
The human and family relationships in this story all seem afflicted with v True to the title, this book is definitely Cuban and dreamy. The human and family relationships in this story all seem afflicted with various strains caused by disease, mental illness, obsession, repression, hysteria There's just too much dysfunctional family behavior, poor life choices and emotional unhappiness in this book for me.
There's not a single romantic relationship in this book that is healthy and supportive. All through the book I kept telling myself that if it doesn't have a coherent ending that wraps things up in a reasonable manner I'm going to give it a rating of one star.
Well as it turns out that it did have a pretty good ending, so I'm giving it two stars. It's the sort of book that gets assigned to modern literature classes in order to torment the students. However, upon finishing this book I see the completed story as a sad tragedy. Then together with her mother they connive to arrange for another grandchild who has grown up in Cuba to leave the country for the USA. Consequently, the grandmother is left alone in Cuba with no remaining children or grandchildren.
The following quotation has special poignancy for me: "Women who outlive their daughters are orphans, Only their granddaughters can save them, guard their knowledge like the first fire. I found the Wikipedia article helpful in keeping characters straight. In that book there is an "ah ha! Jun 29, Lorna rated it really liked it Shelves: cuba , magical-realism , immigrant-experience , new-york.
Dreaming in Cuban was an all-encompassing and heartbreaking saga of three generations of a family caught up in the cataclysmic historical events taking place in Cuba during the revolution. Although there is a lot of history here, for me the heart of the story were the lives of the matriarch Celia and her granddaughter Pilar.
Celia's life was told in epistolary form as she wrote letters to her first love, giving us great insight to her sensibilities and inner life and yearnings. Pilar developed h Dreaming in Cuban was an all-encompassing and heartbreaking saga of three generations of a family caught up in the cataclysmic historical events taking place in Cuba during the revolution. Pilar developed her artistic talents while living in New York with her family yearning for a time to go back to Cuba to reunite with her grandmother.
This is the kind of book that speaks to my heart, an author that I will read again. Until I returned to Cuba, I never realized how many blues exist. The aquamarines near the shoreline, the azures of deeper waters, the eggshell blues beneath my grandmother's eyes, the fragile indigos tracking her hands. There's a blue, too, in the curves of the palms, and the edges of the words we speak, a blue tinge to the sand and the seashells and the plump gulls on the beach.
The mole by Abuela's mouth is also blue, a vanishing blue. View all 8 comments. The book opens with a vision of a man walking across water, a vision seen through a pair of binoculars, by Celia, the matriarchal grandmother. The man she sees is her ailing husband, Jorge del Pino who left for the United States four years earlier to seek medical attention.
Observing the apparition, she understands that he has passed on. Her daughter Lourdes from whom she is estranged and her granddaughter Pilar, with whom she communicates through a kind of telepathic relationship, live in America. Celia is pro the Castro regime while Lourdes abhors it. On opposite sides of the revolutionary fence, neither will budge in their views or actions, despite the consequent rupture in their relationship and the knock on effect it has for others in the family, forced to take sides.
Pilar understands her grandmother and hates that the mother and daughter's political beliefs prevent her from being closer to either of them. She rebels herself without knowing against what exactly, manifesting her discomfort with the world through impassioned artworks that initially disturb her mother and inspire harsh criticism, but which will eventually bring them closer together.
The past is also invoked through a series of letters written by Celia to Gustavo, the man she first loved, who it is revealed is the not the man she married. Though none of these letters were ever sent, they continue to be written over the years, a place where Celia shares her innermost thoughts, desires and regrets.
Her second daughter Felicia never leaves Cuba, marries, has children and at a certain point becomes somewhat deranged, remarrying twice in quick succession, attracting tragedy from the moment of her second marriage. She becomes deluded, seeks refuge in music and the Afro-Cuban cult of Santeria, becomes a priestess and loses herself completely. In literature, it tends to be referred to as magical realism, that occasional departure from the firm reality we are sure of, however it seems almost too easy to dismiss it as a literary device and ignore the connections between and within certain cultural traditions, where this ethereal communication between the living and the dead, those present and those who are not, exists alongside the more mundane communication we all indulge in.
A brilliant addition to a growing collection of literature from this region, in a style I adore. A 5 star read for me. Highly recommended. Read this once before years ago.
I forgot the plot entirely but I remember disliking it immensely. I decided to give it another go. I'm slogging through it and disliking it immensely all over again. Do not know if I can make myself finish I dislike every single character in the book and am having problems caring what happens to them.
The disjointed style and absolute darkness of the story make it seem more like a nightmare than a dream. I f Read this once before years ago. I feel like there is better literature out there about the Cuban diaspora that is not so all-encompassingly bleak.
This book does not capture the spirit of joie de vivre that most Cubans have--a spirit that carries them through their darkest, most harrowing days and that allows them to live on despite the obstacles and hardships of life either on or off the island. The women in this book might be resilient, but they seem to have such a grudge against life that they do not seem Cuban at all. I also feel like a lot of the magical realism in the book is forced and feels out of place.
I still wasn't wild about it, but I enjoyed the ending of the book more than any of the rest of it. I actually enjoyed the ambiguous ending as well. The family story felt too scattered--it was difficult to see how each family member's story related to the other and there were so many narratives to keep track of that it was tedious--reading a book should feel effortless.
You can encounter big thoughts but the words need to be rendered seamlessly so as to make you unaware of them. Their relationship was supposed to be very strong yet it was weakly rendered.
Perhaps she should write a book of essays about the subject, because she seems particularly eloquent as a nonfiction writer. Another huge problem I have with this book, that I am just realizing, is that it's a book about Cuba and being Cuban, and yet Cuba does not at all feel like a character in this book.
It just seems like a background setting. There is little description of it and little sense of what it really means to be Cuban. Any exile will tell you that their country is like a part of them, yet the scant attention paid to the Island itself was disappointing. Would not recommend this book to readers looking for fiction on Cubans and Cuban-Americans, and will not re-read it a third time!
Phew, two was enough. View all 3 comments. In interviews I'm often asked what books shaped me the most, so I've decided to start a shelf where I write about the books that left an impact early in life. Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia is the first that came to mind.
I was in high school when I first heard of it, a freshman in English class. My teacher had photocopied the first chapter. It began: "Celia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north In interviews I'm often asked what books shaped me the most, so I've decided to start a shelf where I write about the books that left an impact early in life.
She returns home from her initiation rites and dies a swift and mysterious death. Jorge, who returns after his death to keep his beloved Lourdes company, informs her of Felicia's death and urges her to return to Cuba. She hesitates until Pilar reaches a kind of spiritual clarity about traveling to Cuba and sets the journey in motion. They return to find Celia in a sorry state, having just buried Felicia and lost her son, Javier he runs off to the mountains, no forwarding address.
Lourdes and Pilar spend time with Celia and Felicia's children in Cuba. Pilar receives her grandmother's unsent letters to Gustavo—essentially her repository of memories—and learns what life is really like in Cuba.
Lourdes visits the places of her past and confirms every bad opinion she's ever had about the island of her birth. She decides to take advantage of the open emigration allowed through the Peruvian embassy to get Ivanito out of Cuba. Even though she knows it will destroy her grandmother, Pilar eventually goes along with the plan because she realizes that there is no future for her little cousin there.
Ultimately, Celia is left by herself in Cuba with very little more than her house by the sea, her poetry, and her trademark pearl earrings, which she drops into the ocean in the last moments of the book. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Already have an account? Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. Page Count: Publisher: Knopf. No Comments Yet. New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller.
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact. Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace Pub Date: Sept.
Review Posted Online: Sept. Show all comments. More by Toni Morrison. Reader Votes Google Rating. Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of National Book Award Finalist.
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