This extraordinary ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes' Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumba describes a country best by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales, tales told contrapuntally in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or Milan Kundera's The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she almost inadvertantly becomes the most famous dissident on the Island.
A modern tale rooted in recent historical events but filtered through a patiently unfolding storytelling style that pays homage to The Arabian Nights, The Lazarus Rumba is a stunning literary debut, a virtuoso performance like no other Latino writer has ever produced.
"A dense, complicated and rich first novel . . . thoroughly original."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Mestre manages to interpret the magic realist tradition in his own distinctive manner . . . [His] symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing."
The New York Times Book Review
"The Lazarus Rumba is a wonderful first novel . . . worthy of our best-known Latin American fabulists. With a fresh imagination and a command of the mischief words can create . . . it is Mestre's inventive extravagance that sets this book apart from others."
