From Publishers Weekly
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1930s Cuba, this ambitious but ultimately disappointing debut fictionalizes Ernest Hemingway's adventures in Havana during the early part of his career. The novel begins with a Cuban-American journalist trying to unearth clues about his grandfather, Javier López Angulo's, friendship with Hemingway. A young Harvard graduate, Angulo accidentally insults Hemingway in a bar and narrowly avoids getting into a fistfight with him-all in the space of one page. As swiftly as the incident flares and fizzles, Javier befriends the enigmatic author, accompanying him on fishing trips and drinking binges and eventually becoming involved in a love triangle with him and an unhappily married American named Jane. Despite these intriguing turns, the novel is surprisingly bland. The characters never come to life, and Estrada's portrayal of Hemingway is a shallow caricature rather than a nuanced character study. Estrada, the founder of Hispanic magazine and the editor-in-chief of Vista, does a fine job capturing the Cuban culture and the people's anxiety leading up to the bloody coup of 1933, but the book's static prose and lack of emotional depth keeps it from truly engrossing the reader.
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A freelance writer casting about for a salable idea pitches an article about Ernest Hemingway's life in Cuba. Not, perhaps, the freshest of ideas, but this one has a twist: the writer's grandfather, advertising man Javier Lopez Angulo, had been one of the people who introduced Hemingway to Cuba, and the two forged a friendship that ended suddenly and mysteriously. Estrada, a former magazine editor who was born in Cuba, has chosen a tricky subject for his first novel: as he acknowledges in his author's note, there are already plenty of Hemingway biographies, and the novelist's time in Cuba has been well documented. But, by recasting Hemingway as a fictional character, Estrada is free to speculate and fill in gaps in the documentary record. Most importantly, he turns his speculations and the familiar Hemingway mythology into a credible, remarkably polished story about a troubled writer's relationship with a tropical island and one of its inhabitants. A natural, of course, for students of Hemingway.
David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
