Loving Che (Hardcover)

~ Ana Menendez (Author) "One day, when I had already grown old with the revolution, a woman came to my door and asked to see the lady of the..." (more)
Key Phrases: Teresa de la Landre, Che Guevara, Pain de Paris (more...)

Editorial 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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (December 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871139081
• ISBN-13: 978-0871139085
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,328,694 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting narrative, lovely writing, February 17, 2004

By	Jessica Ferguson "threelittlebirds" (Woodbury, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With beautiful imagery and intriguing language, Menendez has created a mysterious and intriguing story about love, family, and revolutionary Cuba.

This enchanting diptych of a novel begins in standard form with the narrator questioning her childhood in Miami and expressing her frustration at the lack of information she is able to get from her grandfather about her past and her parents. When a mysterious package arrives filled with letters and photos, the novel takes a stylistic turn and we are thrust into a wholly different life; the life of an artist in Cuba in the 1950s. In brief and beautifully written vignettes, these "letters" seemingly explain the narrator's mother's life and her clandestine affair with Che Guevara.

A return to the narrator's voice at the end of the novel details a renewed search for her mother using the information that has been revealed in the letters. While at the heart of the matter the question seems to be whether or not the narrator is the daughter of Che Guevara, the narrator focuses on her search for her mother and Guevara seems to be an afterthought.

While the initial change in narrative is slightly jarring, it is reflective of how we remember and of how and what one chooses to tell about ones life. The return of the narrator's voice is a smooth transition and further illuminates the letters and the difficulty in both sharing secrets and yet keeping them. As Teresa writes to her daughter "...life is not a tidy narrative.... We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves."

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A little Havana, A lot of a writer's workshop, July 7, 2005

By	Dangle's girl (Astoria, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Loving Che: A Novel (Paperback)

Cuba, as anyone who has lived in Miami can tell you, exists for thousands of exiles chiefly as a fantasy landscape colored by memory, regret and loss. Just as well, because the reality of the place in the 21st century is pretty grim, as I experienced it. But the maddening habit of exiles to romanticize the place is well displayed in "Loving Che," which hardly exists outside of lyrical scraps of random thought, sensation and writerly flights of fancy. Ana Menendez puts a lot of effort into conjuring up her dreamy reveries, but spends little time making her tale remotely believable or affecting. And the frequent pauses for "deep thoughts" get old very quickly. It's a lot like spending an afternoon talking about Cuba with an exile: captivating at times but more often just frustrating, opaque and sad.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poetic But Weak At The End., July 28, 2006

By	Mr. Fellini "Fellini" (El Paso, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Loving Che: A Novel (Paperback)

"Loving Che" is full of so many wonderful passages that vibrate with real literary romance and deep feeling that it's a downer that the novel doesn't go all the way, or provide a more fulfilling ending, but there's enough good material in Ana Menendez's book to make it worth reading. Like many classic works, this one involves an investigation into the past during which incredible discoveries are made and extreme possibilities hinted at. A Cuban exile who never really knew her mother is sent a strange package containing a sort of diary detailing a love affair during the Cuban revolution with the legendary rebel Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was assassinated in Bolivia and lived on in history as one of the most potent, enduring icons of rebellion and social revolution. The book begins with nice moments of recollection as the main character recalls growing up with her exiled grandfather in Miami, never being told anything about her mother, but it's when the book moves into the diary passages that things get interesting. With romantic passages that inspire and use language as skillfull as Salman Rushdie's, many of these parts come to life as the woman named Teresa describes her life as an artist and how she met Che Guevara and was captivated by his mind and spirit. Teresa is married, so is Che, and so of course the affair is tightly kept secret. It is here where the novel delivers and yet comes short, the implications are already enough to keep us reading, but you're surprised at just how LITTLE of Che's life is incorporated. At the end of the novel Menendez lists her sources, really good ones too like "Guevara, Also Known As Che" by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, which is probably the best Guevara bio there is, and yet the character is written with so little real dialogue, or any real moments that don't have to do with just descriptions of carnal pleasure. To be fair, Menendez does pepper many of the Che scenes with rich passages where Teresa describes Guevara's spirit for change, how he does not feel suited for just one country but many, and how his fatalistic take on life will lead him to immortality, to an almost saintly pantheon in world history. The pages dealing with the coming of the Cuban revolution are exciting and filled with vivid images and moments, but again, it is the abscence of more Che that leaves the Cuban area lacking. And then there's the ending. We feel as if we've been set up for a big payoff and then get no answers, just a simple, even weird closing that doesn't explain anything. Maybe Menendez was being too cautious considering she is dealing here with a world icon after all, but if you're going to take the risk at least go all the way. She builds a real sense of excitement and then brings us down. Maybe it's Menendez's exile history, many pages near the end feel more like the typical criticisms exiles have of Cuba, an almost bitter nostalgia for their island, Menendez even takes breaks from the story to diss Castro a little. She understands the romantic allure of Che, but sometimes it feels conflicted with her personal feelings as an exile. All in all, "Loving Che" is a nice romantic novel with some wonderful passages and beautiful, so beautiful indeed, that it deserves a little more.