Loving Che - Vendido!

by Ana Menendez

Atlantic Monthly Press; (December 1, 2003)
240 pages


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Book Description
A daring debut novel about a woman’s love affair with Che Guevara by the acclaimed young author of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Ana Menéndez’s story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd was hailed by the Times’s book critic as "powerful" and "achingly wise." Now, in her first novel, Loving Che, Menéndez delivers an astonishing, intimate portrait of revolutionary Cuba as witnessed by an elderly woman recalling her secret love affair with the world’s most dashing, charismatic rebel, Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
The story opens in contemporary Miami, where for years a young Cuban woman has been searching in vain for details of her birth mother. All she knows of her past is that her grandfather fled the turbulent Havana of the 1960s for Miami with her in tow, and pinned to her sweater—possibly by her mother—were a few treasured lines of a Pablo Neruda poem. These facts remain her only tenuous links to her history, until a mysterious parcel arrives in the mail. Inside the soft, worn box are layers of writings and photographs. Fitting these pieces together with insights she gleans from several trips back to Havana, the daughter reconstructs the life of her mother, her youthful affair with the enigmatic Che, and the child she bore by the handsome rebel.
Loving Che is a brilliant recapturing of revolutionary Cuba, the changing social mores, the hopes and disappointments, the excitement and terror of the times. It is also an erotic fantasy, a glimpse into the private life of a beloved public figure, and an exquisitely crafted meditation on memory, history, and storytelling. Finally, Loving Che is a triumphant unveiling of how the stories we tell about others ultimately become the story of ourselves.


Quotes and Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
In this evocative first novel by short story writer Menendez (In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd), a young, unnamed Miami woman is granted an intimate look into her provenance with the arrival of a package of old photographs and letters. An infant during the revolution, she was sent from Cuba to be raised by her kind but unforthcoming grandfather; her mother, Teresa, seems to have vanished. But this package of writings "smell[ing] of dark drawers and musty rooms" reveals Teresa de la Landre’s life, from her carefree girlhood to her marriage, artistic career and impassioned affair with revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Teresa’s poetic memories, which make up the bulk of the book, are rich in sensual detail ("Ernesto... his touch like wading into a small pool only to find it deep and cool and sweet beneath the reflection") and full of the terror and exhilaration of revolution ("After the triumph... it was the strange and dreadful excitement of a world turning, of everything staid and ordinary being swept away"). Despite the tension in the narrator’s search to learn her mother’s fate and the true identity of her father-was it Che, or Teresa’s professor husband, Calixto?-the present-day story, which bookends the letters, is less developed. The dreamy portrait of tropical Havana in gorgeous decay ("Where the cement had cracked, small purple flowers blossomed, as if every house held a garden prisoner within its walls") lingers, while the narrator’s hopeful but pragmatic thoughts during her quest can fall somewhat flat. Still, the glimpses of vibrant 1950s Cuba and Teresa and Che’s perfectly rendered relationship make this a moving novel from a writer to watch.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com
In her first book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, Ana Menendez assembled an enchanting collection of short stories. Crafted with a lush, poetic prose, the stories were lyrical, wise and affecting, offering up a vision of Cuban exile life filled with aching loss and absurd hilarity. Loving Che, Menendez’s first novel, has many of the same qualities, but her hand is not as deft, her footing not as sure.
Menendez begins her story in Miami, where her protagonist has been raised by a kindly but dour grandfather who fled Cuba soon after the revolution with his infant granddaughter in tow. Menendez’s nameless narrator claims to have had "an uneventful, even pleasant childhood," growing up in a home with "no television set, no magazines, no photographs, only books and the quiet turning of pages." Her life history is threadbare, almost a tabula rasa. The only clue to her past is some lines of verse by Pablo Neruda that were pinned to her sweater by her mother the night her little girl left Cuba.
After college and the death of her grandfather, she travels to Havana hoping to find some links to her past -- but always in vain. Then a box arrives at her Miami Beach home -- filled with letters, writings and photographs -- from a woman who reveals herself as her mother, Teresa.
At this point, Teresa takes over as narrator, telling her story in fragments of memory, remorse and heartbreak. She is a daughter of privilege who married a scholar and a gentleman. Through her husband, a sympathizer with the revolution against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, she meets the Argentine-born guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara and falls hopelessly in love.
Teresa seems to have been inspired to some degree by Naty Revuelta, the beautiful, bored, aristocratic wife of a Cuban doctor, who became besotted with Fidel Castro in the 1950s. After a brief affair, which spawned a daughter, Castro moved on to other loves and his primary passion, power. Content with her narrow niche of history, Naty -- unlike her daughter -- remained in Cuba. Likewise, Menendez’s Teresa chooses to live in Cuba, feasting on memories of her former lover.
Among the most compelling parts of Teresa’s account is her retelling of some crucial events in Cuban history, from the fall of Batista to the destruction of the swank department store El Encanto, which was mysteriously firebombed in 1961. There is the death of the glorious student revolutionary Jose Antonio Echeverria at age 25 and the stunning rise of Eddy Chibas, the reformer-radio commentator who could have been his country’s great hope but instead, as in the last act of a bel canto opera, shot himself to death during a live radio broadcast.
"One year later, the coup, like a great shot in the dark, ended the illusion that the future was forever," Menendez writes, describing the devastation wreaked by Batista’s coup in 1952, which historian Hugh Thomas likened to a national nervous breakdown. "Suicide is our one constant ideology," Menendez observes darkly, "our muddy heart’s single desire." Such passages searingly render Cuba’s history in human terms and costs, but they are scattered thinly about the narrative. The reader yearns for more information to anchor this fanciful, ambitious novel.
At its best, Loving Che has some of the quality of Wide Sargasso Sea (also set in the Caribbean), Jean Rhys’s haunting novel about the imagined life of Mrs. Rochester, the mysterious wife of Jane Eyre’s love. Rhys took advantage of the perquisites of fiction, while Menendez is burdened and challenged by history and the iconography of her subject. Notwithstanding Che’s grievous delusions, he has been mythologized as the Achilles of our time -- a legend requiring only a nickname for identification. With his movie-star good looks plastered on coffee mugs and T-shirts around the globe, Che is as much of an icon as James Dean or the Beatles.
Understandably, the folks at Grove Press (who had a successful turn at publishing a Che biography a few years back) have seized the opportunity to exploit their charismatic subject. They have studded the text with almost a dozen black-and-white images of the photogenic Che -- ostensibly the very ones Teresa sends to her daughter. But the photos both enhance and detract from the work. While intriguing to look at, these powerful images underscore the novel’s central weakness: Che himself, beyond Teresa’s fevered obsession, never roars to life.
Also troubling are contrivances in the storytelling. How is it possible that our unnamed protagonist obtains so little information from her grandfather about her mother -- his daughter? Can it really be that Teresa dispatches her infant daughter to Miami so that she will not be reminded of her barbudo (bearded) lover? "I read him in every move of your hands," Teresa inadequately explains. Curiously, the author fails to exploit the process of her daughter’s sleuthing, with its attendant drama and suspense.
Menendez does not have the powerful narrative line or confident exuberance of fellow exile writers Cristina Garcia or Ernesto Mestre. She does, however, have a keen ear for dialogue, along with perfect pitch for the nuances of Cuban culture. Unforgettable is the lunch with a desperate habanera, who prattles on ceaselessly as she cooks: "Do you have any idea of the boredom we endure here? There’s no police state here; that would at least be exciting. . . . Instead they have anesthesized us with boredom. Cuban days are the longest in all the world. You could disappear for three months and no one would notice." But we hear very little from characters other than Teresa and her daughter, and Teresa’s long, rambling account often veers into a hushed portentousness. While there are pleasures in reading this novel, its central conceit -- Teresa’s affair with the legendary Che -- never loses its sense of being a confection.
Menendez’s strengths are her idiosyncratic, poetic prose and her unsentimental insights about all things Cuban. "Miami seemed to me in those years to be living in reverse," says the daughter-narrator. "They named even their stores after the ones they had lost; and the rabid radio stations carried the same names as the ones they had listened to in Cuba, as if they were the slightly crazed sons of a once prominent family. This endless pining for the past seemed to me a kind of madness, everyone living in an asylum, exiled from the living, and no one daring to say it plainly." This is fascinating stuff, and it grounds Menendez’s emotionally charged characters and not entirely convincing storytelling. Would that she had told us more.
Reviewed by Ann Louise Bardach

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agree that Loving Che does not live up to the wide acclaim of Menéndez’s short story collection, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. In Loving Che the former journalist attempts a more ornate and less journalistic style, which does not quite succeed. Reviewers praise her poetic language and sensual descriptions of Cuba but note that her emphasis on Che’s romantic life comes at the expense of solid historical and political context. Important events serve only to illustrate the phases of Che and Teresa’s affair, which, in the end, resembles a bodice-ripper romance. If you’re not a fan of historical romance novels, the consensus is: wait for Menéndez’s next effort.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
When a young woman from Miami goes in search of the mother she never met, she receives an anonymous package with old letters and paintings that tell the story of a passionate woman who had an affair with Che Guevara. The daughter’s voice is read in a tone filled with longing; she drops her voice at appropriate points to accentuate secrets being whispered and mysteries being pondered. The mother’s letters are read in an older, loving tone filled with sadness and poetry. The side-endings are not always appropriate, like the middle of a young boy yelling, interupting the flow of the narration. J.F.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist
Menendez, author of the superb short story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), once again brings the Cuban experience to life in her first novel. A woman goes to Cuba in search of information about her lost mother, whom she never knew, but returns empty handed. However, she soon receives a mysterious package full of hastily written letters and pictures of charismatic rebel Che Guevara. What follows is the story of Theresa, an artist from a wealthy background who eventually loses her heart to Che, an unlikely lover. The backdrop to their romance is Cuba during the Revolution--burning cars, coups, dwindling resources. Che visits Theresa often, and together they face a world of harsh realities. As the narrator realizes that Theresa is her mother and Che is her father, Cuba is born anew in her eyes, for a man she was brought up to revile is suddenly revealed to be her father. She returns to Cuba with renewed zeal, and its legends become the story of her life. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Chris Watson, The Santa Cruz Sentinel
"[Loving Che] is an exuberant and poetic look at loss and memory."

Vanity Fair
"[Loving Che] puts [Menéndez] in the company of other Latino writers such as Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros."

Kirkus Reviews
"Convincing and compelling….evokes the flavor and feeling of Havana…with doubts, anomalies, and long, deep affections and sorrows intact."

Ruth Lopez, The New York Times Book Review
"Menéndez captures Cuba’s potential, its desperation and decay, and also its dark humor."

Timothy Peters, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Menèndez’s focus is on a much more intimate drama; she uses the revolution because it illuminates her theme of separation."

Elle
"[Menéndez] explores this explosive era in [Cuba’s] history in gorgeously atmospheric, intimately rendered prose."

Julia Sutherland, The Financial Times
"Clever, and well constructed. The style of Teresa’s writings is that of romantic fiction; the other parts more investigative memoir."

Mary Margaret Benson, Library Journal
"Eloquent....The writing is consistently beautiful. Highly recommended."

Anderson Tepper, Time Out
"An evocative… love letter to a salt-of-the-earth guerrilla lover, a vanished world and the eternal ruins of memory."

Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News
"Loving Che is a well crafted contemplation of history and myth, storytelling and memory."


About the author

Copyright of the photo: Judy Axenson

Ana Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s and married a few months after meeting at a Cuban social club in Glendale. Menéndez worked as a journalist for six years, first at The Miami Herald, where she covered Little Havana, and later with The Orange County Register in California. She is a graduate of NYU’s creative writing program, where she was a New York Times fellow. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd has been translated into eleven languages.