Customer Reviews

The Messenger

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4 star:		(1)
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The Palm of Darkness left me wanting more of Mayra Montero. I expected another excellent book - I got an exquisite one. Montero masterfully handles a variety of voices, scene changes that are cultural as well as temporal, and weaves them into a magnificant unity. The story is sufficiently compelling that one appreciates the craftmanship only in retrospect.

Within my taste she stands with Emmanuel Carrere, Luis Sepulveda, and Antonio Tabbuchi as a true contemporary master of the novel.

This imagined love story between the great Enrico Caruso and a Chinese-Cuban local is based on an actual event, a bomb that went off while Caruso was performing Aida at the Teatro Nacional in June of 1920, and which caused him to flee into the street and disappear for a week, fearing for his life.

This book comes in two parts: the first half is mostly setup, explaining the woman (Aida Cheng)'s patchwork personal history, and how her family managed to meld the spirituality of both China and Cuba into some kind of earthy herbal cocktail. It delves a little into Caruso's past, and how he wound up coming to Cuba to get away from the dark forces in Italy and New York that he felt were following him, but Aida Cheng is clearly the protagonist, and though she's a simple woman, Mayra Montero writes a great amount of depth into her emotions. This is a character whose feelings start just below the skin and run very deep.

The second half of the book, after the explosion, when Aida and Enrico go into hiding, is where the book takes off. Dream sequences bleed into each other as if the reader has been affected by some of the spells that are constantly being thrown about. Aida and Enrico cling to each other through their dark swampy ordeal like animals huddled against an oncoming storm. They get help from the most powerful people in their respective worlds, and it's almost enough to get them to safety. But Enrico has a wife already, and Aida Cheng has no idea about the world outside of Cuba, and the ending, while not bleak, seems to have been foretold by the spirits all along.

This is a murky, uneven, sweaty book, that will make you feel like you're constantly waking up out of a surreal and slightly harrowing dream. No knock on the translation, but I'd like to read this in the original Spanish at some point, as this is ultimately a wonderful read in English.

I loved the book because it deals with Enrico Caruso, the greatest tenor who ever lived, and it is very well written. The story takes place in Cuba and describes what happened after a bomb exploded during an Aida performance of Caruso (this starting place of the story really happened) - for the rest of the story - one has to admit that it is purely fictional. Caruso taking part in strange Voodoo ceremonies, the black hand persecuting him and chasing him all over Cuba and he strangely in love with a Chinese girl. Also in the description of the looks and the character of Caruso I could not actually recognize him.... But who cares when the story as a story itself is so exiting. The magic of the book lies in its description of fate and tragedy around the famous man. Somehow its easy to take mentally part in the story...and you'll read it in a night, so thrilling and exiting is the book... I had the feeling it was written by somebody who fell in love with the famous voice and added a little bit too much imagination :-) It's like an opera of Verdi - you think it's absurd, but you love it.

Ps: Who already owns the book and is interested to know, the name written on the picture (KiKo) is one of Caruso's nicknames. If you want to have a look on it, you'll find it in Dorothy Caruso's book about her husband.

The story of a brief romance between the opera singer Enrico Caruso and a Chinese-mulatta Cuban woman, Aida Petrirena Cheng, narrated by their illegitimate daughter. The romance is doomed because Caruso is only making a short tour in Cuba, he's married, the Sicilian Black Hand is making death threats, and he may be seriously ill (the last I never figured out).

The story is presented like a tragic opera. Unfortunately, although competently written the book is emotionally uninvolving throughout. The characters, though not stereotyped, never came to life, and neither did the story. It always seemed as though everyone was making much too much of a fuss about everything. So Caruso had a (fictional) fling; what's the big deal?