Born in the year of Castro's Revolution, Yocandra embodies Cuba's promise and hope. But she grows up to see how the regime is turning her island into a wasteland of despair. For Yocandra and her friends, coping with life means escaping into dreams, humour, sex and an appetite for the absurd.
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
This highly erotic, seemingly autobiographical novel by Cuban writer Valdes describes narrator Yocandra's series of relationships with allegorical characters?fraudulent writer Traitor, filmmaker Nihilist, aesthete Lynx, and the best friend Gusana ("worm"), a pejorative term for nonpatriots. As a wry, if not outright humorous, indictment of Castro's Cuba (the Nada, or "nothing," of the title), this portrayal of the bleak reality of quotidian life in his regime is offset by occasional intertextual references (Lezama Lima comes especially to mind). The fluid translation introduces English-speaking audiences to the first fruits of a highly imaginative writer.?Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
After being cast out of purgatory onto a mystical island (aka Cuba) "that in waiting to build a paradise has created a hell," a woman asks, "Why swim? Why drown?" thus foretelling Yocandra's highly ambivalent life in this interesting first novel by Cuban Valdes. From Yocandra's symbolic revolutionary origins to her life as the starving, abused wife of a diplomat turned psychotic (the "Traitor"), and finally to her life as a literary editor, we witness the demoralizing effects of a corrupt, repressive political regime on Yocandra, her parents, and her two closest friends, now in exile. But for Yocandra, ambivalence about Cuba prevails, most notably in her allegorically double sex life: she alternates nights with the "Nihilist" (whom she really loves and with whom she experiences prolonged, carefully described sexual ecstasies) and the "Traitor" (her ex-husband, whom she wishes to humiliate). Amidst such stark designations, Yocandra's satirical side also emerges, as does her struggle (as the novel closes with its opening line, and she wonders if she writes the words or vice versa) to emerge as a writer. Jim O'Laughlin
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
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This review is from: Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada (Hardcover)
Zoe Valdes was born in Cuba in 1959 and fled to France in 1995. Overnight, she has vaulted to the first rank of contemporary Latin American novelists. "Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada" (Arcade Publishing: 1997) was her first novel published in English. "I Gave You All I Had" (Arcade Publishing: 1999), which existed in manuscript as early as 1995, and "My Father's Foot" (Planeta: 2002) have recently added to her reputation.Told in the first person, "Yocandra" is a brief, rich, wrenching, serio-comic, episodic, film-influenced, belle-lettristic piece of performance art, in which the narrator's voice is, happily, always present. Thrust out of a magic-realist Purgatory in a cycle of petition and rejection, Yocandra is confined to Castro's Cuba. A person's name may be important, but apparently not in Cuba. Yocandra exchanges one name, the name of her country, for the name of a muse in a failed effort to buy love. All of the other major characters in the book lack proper names. Her two lovers bear nicknames -- the Traitor and the Nihilist -- which reflect their relationship to the Cuban state. Like characters in a Bergman film, they meet and play a game of chess together while Yocandra suffers a spiritual crisis. Her father, a Communist Party hack, destroys a treasure trove of homoerotic art because it offends his orthodox machismo views. Her girlfriend, the Worm, escapes to Spain, where her life with a belching fat man becomes as strained as that of a character in an Almodovar film. Yocandra's lost love, the Lynx, stumbles upon a nighttime sailing expedition to Miami, willingly joins in, and alone survives a storm when he lashes himself to stray timber and floats free. This is a Cuba in which Communist ideology and bureaucracy have bred poverty, corruption, and disconnects in the extreme. In the background of Yocandra's story, neighborhood vigilantes search excrement-strewn dumpsters for signs of political disloyalty, bicyclists who pedal to forget are branded loose women, the data entry clerk at Yocandra's literary journal creates her database anew each day when the power cuts out before she saves her work, everyone barters everything of value for what passes for food, and the sea pounds relentlessly and the sun continues hypnotically to shine. Sex plays a prominent part in "Yocandra." (Valdes has said that, growing up fatherless and without money in Cuba, she had sex instead of toys.) Devotees of erotic fiction told from a woman's perspective may appreciate the clinical description of Yocandra's lovemaking with the Nihilist, whose perfect body includes a perfectly used thirteen-inch tool. But if the scene is erotic, it is not because there is any affection, much less love, passing between the two. Sex without love -- like literature without words, pride without accomplishment, work without labor, birth without creation -- is a staple of Yocandra's daily life in Cuba. This is a provocative book, written with style by an author to contend with.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incredibly real account of life in Cuba in the mid 90s,
By A Customer
This review is from: Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada (Hardcover)
Zoe Valdes has been able to articulate, in a literary fasion, what I have sought to do for the last five years since I spent a year a half in Cuba and left unable to express what I had seen, heard and experienced. She highlights the contradictions brilliantly, illustrates how the regime has suppressed individuality and personal initiative and has produced an island of crazy old fools, (like her mother) men who can only repeat the same paranoid line over and over, (like the great leader) hyper-sexualized youth, (what else is there to do? How else to relax?) prostitutes, prisoners, young people for whom the threat of sharks and drowning is better than staying on the island, the wretching pain of losing all your friends to exile, the Hernia (what a great metaphor!). There is so much in this little book -- I would like to re-read it, and recommend it to anyone who wants to know what life is like on the island in this decade. This book, reflecting life in Cuba, is very, very sad and somewhat hopeless yet it must be read.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Sensual Story of Survival in post-revolutionary Cuba,
By A Customer
This review is from: Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada (Hardcover)
Her mother, then nine months pregnant, trekked to Havana for the big rally on May 1, 1959 and when she went into labour in the middle of Fidel Castro¹s speech and had to be carried away, Che Guevara rushed to her side and draped a Cuban flag over her belly. Her proud father named her Patria ³the fatherland², but by the time Patria became an adult living in a country where food was something barely more than a dream, she chucked her patriotic name and officially changed it to Yocandra, a character in her fat, old boyfriend¹s novel. Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada is a novel of personal survival in post revolutionary Cuba. It¹s power comes from its snapshot images of Cuba ravished by hurricanes and famine--the latter being caused by political indecisiveness, disastrous economic planning and the US boycott. The novel takes no sides, politically speaking. Instead it exposes the restlessness of the disgruntled youth born after the revolution and the nostalgia of their idealistic parents. The author, Zoe Valdes, contrasts the troubled youth trapped in a nightmarish reality with the stoic, idealism of those who supported Castro and longed for the revolution. Caught in a time warp, they struggle to achieve a sense of dignity lost in dreams which never materialise in Castro¹s Cuba. Here survival boils down to the two most basic needs: food and sex. Yocandra definitely leaves an impact
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