Customer Reviews

Loving Che: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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."

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

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

"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.

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.

Loving Che takes place in contemporary Miami, as a young woman longs to uncover her past. Once she receives a package of letters and photographs, the narrative shifts to her mother's voice recalling the years of the Cuban Revolution and her love affair with Che Guevera. Then, the narrative shifts back to modern day as the unnamed narrator seeks to use the clues from letters and photographs to fill in the details of her life.

I'm a huge fan of historical fiction featuring real people, and Che Guevera is someone I've been fascinated with quietly for years. Loving Che is a unique piece of historical fiction. It's events are intricately linked to actual events in the very public life of Che Guevera and the Cuban revolution, but the links come in broad strokes more often than details. There's also a mysterious element to the novel as our narrator seeks answers to her questions about identity. My favorite part of the novel was its last third. It was a fascinating journey, and I couldn't help but think of A. Manette Ansay's fabulous Good Things I Wish You, where the lines between fiction, research, and memoir became blurred into a lovely piece of metafiction. I don't know how much Menendez's journey to research this novel mimicked itself in the narrator's research of her life, but it was quite fascinating to read about. At times, this novel veered into romance:

"The first kiss is more intimate than the naked bed; it's small perimeter already contains the first submission and the final betrayal." (p. 91)

At times, it was both romantic and wise:

"I wonder now if people don't make up their reasons for deception after the fact. And that what truly leads us into the arms of another lies beyond our comprehension." (p. 93)

There are so many beautiful truths in this novel:

"But death to me is more a regret, not a fear. Fear is one of the things that make us value life. But how can you fear the inevitable? It would be like fearing the dawn." (p. 112)

There were a few moments that felt uneven in this novel. Because I read The Last War first (Menendez's most recent novel), I was willing to forgive some first novel pacing issues. The depth of the ending surprised me; I had written off this novel as simple and sweet despite my enjoyment of Menendez's writing. I was moved to tears and quite pondering by the novel's last pages, and I think it will haunt me for quite some time.

Loving Che is a lyrical tale of love, revolution, life, identity and the power of the unknown. Recommended for fans of historical fiction, women's fiction and literary fiction.

With lines from a Pablo Neruda poem, I was hooked on this amazing book from the beginning. It's a lush, poetic, entrancing read and unlike any other book I've read. Teresa's letters are dreamlike, they flow over the pages and drop insights like raindrops on a parched earth. From her marriage, to her affair with Che to the early days of the revolution in Cuba, Teresa's story is entrancing. Her daughter's search is just as involving. Whether or not Teresa actually had the affair with Che is made irrelevant by the poetic words with which Teresa tells us her story. If she had the affair, good for her. If not, what an imagination!

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.

Menendez is an eloquent, lyrical, strong writer that captured my attention from the first sentence in "Loving Che." I am Cuban and collect Cuban books. Finally, the market is opening its doors to exceptional Latino writers. If you are a collector of Cuban everything, there is a little gem of a Cuban picturebook (for kids) set in Miami's Little Havana Calle Ocho Festival titled, "Drum, Chavi, Drum!/Toca, Chavi, Toca!" These two books are must read --must have -- for your Cuban book collection.

This first novel by Menendez whose short story collection, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd first showed us her talent, builds on what will be a growing reputation as one of America's newest literary talents. The book which deals with a woman's search for her mother who sent her to America with her grandfather, and her mother's extraordinary life, including an affair with Che. Like so many authors writing today, the lines between where truth begins and end is explored, not only within the context of the story, but within our own experiences.

Menendez economical use of words shows that she is a master of the fiction craft, expecting the reader to delve deeper into the story, but also those assumptions they bring to the work.

Some writers tell a story for the story's sake. Menendez is concerned with art for art's sake as passage to passage is filled with the sensory details and wonderful characterization that would be perfect for study by the would be writer or in writing programs.

Besides that, the reader who latches on to young writers like these can look forward to everything they produce for years to come. It would be like reading the early Alice Walker, or Amy Tan, or Louise Erdrich....knowing that to start out this compelling will only be a prelude of things to come.