Customer Reviews

Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada

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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.

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.

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

as a cubanmerican, cuban by birth, american by choice, i was moved beyond words by ms. valdes narrative of the cuban tragedy. tragedy because even though i live in the land of freedom and opportunity, there is always present in my heart, the anguish and the uncertainty for the ones left behind in the island. be it by their choice or by the designs of their destiny. ms. v., captures this so very well. i also was able to enjoy very much her comparasion of her old lover, the writer who charmed and bought the youthful yocandra her schooling and all the other things the revolution could not give its people, but only the priviliged ones at the top could. it is always the same story. the old man could only write the same sentence over and over. like mr. castro, who can only repeat the same empty promises over and over again without any respect for his people who have been hearing them for the past 4 decades. I was deeply moved by yocandra's telephone conversation when her rafter friend after he arrives in miami and narrates to her his ordeal leaving everything behind in the paradise of nada and facing the caribean ocean with strangers while his only baggage was his hope for a better life. that to me sums up all the words that as a refugee i wished i could have said so many times, over and over. i would like to read this book in spanish but i don't think is available now. please bring more books of tis caliber. i am quite tired of reading about our despotic hispanic machos and about how little we have done about them until these past two decades. gracias.

This novel is about a Cuban woman, Yocandra, recounting her life story punctuated with stories of others in her family and entourage. This book is a long cry for something better for an island that could be so much more than what its leaders allow it to be.

The main character was born in 1959 to patriotic parents who believed in the socialist doctrines of Cuba's political leaders. Yocandra laments her monotonous and boring life in the communist system where her and her friends wish they could be so much more if it were not for the stifling conformism, fear and repression. She is frustrated with Cuba's permanent clinging to an impossible Dream, as life there is only getting harder, corruption increasing and politicians blaming the US blocade for any shortcomings. She often points out common things that we take for granted that are unavailable or very expensive in Cuba, and she paints a bleak picture of Cuban society where youth and intellectuals are disillusioned.

I found the writing style in the first person interesting. It is a thin book so I would recommend it for the brutally vivid and colourful descriptions of people and scenes if you are interested in Cuba specifically, but even at its short lenght I found that it tended to be rather long for the lack of a specific story plot. If you don't have a specific interest in Cuban life and problems then I would not recommend this book to you.

This story is a boring tale of everyday Cuba. I could not find anything intereing in it. The only good thing is the title, because it describes exactly what it this book about: nothing (= nada). I have read other books that also talks about Cuban everyday life with a much better literary quality. I would not recommend it.

I read this book in Spanish. For all of those that can read it in this language I truly recommend it. It is very hard to interpret the Cuban lingo and it looses its flavor when it is translated.

Overall this a great short novel that depicts the cruel and harsh reality that the Cuban people have gone and continue to go through.

Vrlo interesantna knjiga koju bih preporucila najpre zenskoj publici. Nabijena erotikom, puna emocija ljubavi i besa. Upoznajte kako se zivi na Kubi.