Telex from Cuba

Read Rachel Kushner's first novel TELEX FROM CUBA more for the future promise of its author than for any classic unity, coherence and emphasis in its telling. The story is lush, overweight, with too many narrative voices and too many minor characters going nowhere. ***

That said, TELEX FROM CUBA brings back pre-Castro Cuba with its American-European dominated refineries, sugar plantations and U.S. Government owned nickel mining operation not far from Guantanamo. It is an historical novel as inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott's WAVERLEY. For the rise of Fidel and Raul Castro is arguably in a world-historical league with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746. The book is more strikingly an American-Cuban novel of manners in the genre pioneered by Jane Austen in EMMA. But mainly it is a series of static tableaux, some likely to stay in the memory. ***

There is Raul Castro, who looks and is generally held to be homosexual, though not by the American executive who attends his wedding. There is macho Fidel Castro who is not above slipping into ex Waffen SS Christian de La Maziere's tent and bed at night. ***

There are Southerners who work in the tropics for big corporations, either white trash or not much better. In the States they would be nobodies. In Cuba they live in fancy mansions, have access to corporate airplanes and a private rail car and generally lord it over the local people. ***

There is Papa Ernest Hemingway asking everyone, male or female, to dance Caribbean dances with him. ***

My favorite passages relate to Hemingway, Saint-John Perse, Xenophon and the retreat of the 10,000 from the highlands of today's Turkey to the sea. And how soldier of fortune La Maziere processes what the obtuse Papa had missed: Perse's "treatise on violence and loss, based on Xenophon's Anabasis" (p. 199). Later when La Maziere is in the mountains of Oriente province trying to shape up the rebel army, he contrasts Cuban laziness and self-absorption with the ancient Greek mercenaries, their discipline and joy in combat for the sake of combat. ***

In 1912 Sinclair Lewis had to write HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE and get it out of his system before he could do ELMER GANTRY in 1927. I can't wait to see what super-talented Rachel Kushner has in store for us next. I wonder if she might not rival O'Henry if she tried her hand at short stories. For her own view of herself read the interview at http://www.powells.com/ink/rachelkushner.html/. This interview convincingly explains why she transplanted her best character, French aristocrat La Maziere, into Batista's Cuba. ***

If you read this book, you will, I suspect, be simultaneously fascinated, confused, disappointed and hoping fervently for more and better very soon from Rachel Kushner. -OOO-