Loving Che: A Novel [Paperback]

Ana Menendez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2004

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 that 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 a life of her mother, her youthful affair with the dashing, charismatic Che Guevara and the child she bore by the enigmatic 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 mythic 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.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (November 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141749
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141743
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting narrative, lovely writing, February 16, 2004

By 

Jessica Ferguson "threelittlebirds" (Woodbury, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loving Che (Hardcover)

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."

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars TWO POETIC AND POIGNANT VOICES, March 14, 2004

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loving Che (Audio Cassette)

Champion voice performers Adriana Sananes and Eileen Stevens breathe life into this story of a love affair between a young artist, Theresa, and rebel Ernesto "Che" Guevara. At times the narrative is softly emotional at other times fraught with danger; it is also an incomparable painting of revolutionary Cuba.

Although she has been searching for a number of years a young Miami woman has not unearthed a clue about her birth mother whom she has never seen nor heard about. One day an unexpected package arrives containing pages of writing and photographs. Slowly these items are pieced together to reveal the life of her mother and the youthful affair she had with "Che" Guevara.

Related in two distinct voices "Loving Che" is poetic, passionate, and poignant - an altogether irresistible listening experience.

- Gail Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "You appeared like a vision...", September 7, 2011

By 

Evelyn Getchell "Evie" (Gulf Coast of Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loving Che: A Novel (Paperback)

Loving Che, the stunning debut novel of Ana Menendez, is a beautifully original, sumptuously elegiac tale of a young woman's search to fill the gaping hole left in her personal history when, as a young baby during the turbulence of the Cuban Revolution in the sixties, she was exiled to Miami with her maternal grandfather.

The young Latina comes of age in a void, knowing next to nothing about her enigmatic mother and even less about her father. Raised alone by her quiet grandfather in the Cuban community of west Miami, she grows to adulthood as a lonely woman without father, without mother. Nor is her grandfather forthcoming with any substantial information about them. Of her parents who remained behind in Havana during the revolution, her grandfather tells her that her father was in prison there and then died. Her mother, unable to live with her grief after his death, sent her baby away with her grandfather when he fled the revolution to Miami. Grandfather has little else to share with his granddaughter about her parents - no photographs, no letters, no documents, save for one fragile scrap of paper - a note he found pinned to the baby's clothing when they fled Cuba ... a few lines from a poem by Pablo Neruda.

In the later years following the death of her grandfather, she embarks on several journeys back to Havana to trace her past and to search for her mother. What she discovers in the rich and resonant Cuba of her birth is a remarkable story of passion and poetry, the poignancy of exquisite pain in the soul's separation from its beloved.

Ana Menendez has written a perfectly poised novel of heart, soul and spirit. This intimate story is as compelling as it is convincing. Loving Che burns with sensuous and erotic metaphors of love. It is historically thrilling, exotically atmospheric and rapturously hot-blooded - a mythical meditation between art and reality, love and dreams.

"And then one day you appeared. Beneath my window, singing for me the poem that so many years ago your father had sung for me.

You appeared like a vision..."



Farewell, but you will be
with me, you will go within
a drop of blood circulating in my veins. ~ Pablo Neruda