Cuba and the Night

Product Description

Having captivated readers with such gems of travel writing as Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer now presents a novel whose central character is another place: the melancholy, ebullient, and dazzlingly inconsistent island that is Castro's Cuba. "On almost every page you can smell the dust, the cheap perfume and the rum of Havana today, or better still, tonight."--Los Angeles Times.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in contemporary Cuba, travel writer Iyer's fictional debut tells of an uneasy love affair between a cynical American photojournalist and a voluptuous young Cuban woman. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Pico Iyer has written nonfiction books on globalism, Japan, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and forgotten places, and novels on Revolutionary Cuba and Islamic mysticism. He regularly writes about literature for  The New York Review of Books; about travel for the  Financial Times; and about global culture and the news for  Time,  The New York Times, and magazines around the world.

From the Back Cover

Richard, the jaded photojournalist who is Iyer's narrator, thinks he believes in nothing. He knows that the most beautiful women cruising the Calle 21 aren't women at all. And he strongly suspects that the ravishing cubana named Lourdes is only looking for a ticket to America - just as Lourdes fears that she may be nothing more than Richard's Caribbean souvenir. Yet, almost against their will, these two people fall in love. And what ensues is a story of passion and regret that is moving, arousing, and voluptuously atmospheric. A story that could only be told by the noted travel writer Pico Iyer, it is an ironic paean to a place where everyone has two fatherlands: "Cuba and the night".

From Booklist

In his first venture into fiction, Iyer follows his compass through the oldest known terrain, love. The Cuba he describes is the Cuba we've been reading about for some years now, an island locked in time, "the whole crazy island slipping backward through history." Iyer, known for his lucid and penetrating travel writing in Video Night in Kathmandu and, most recently, a collection of shorter fiction, Falling off the Map, has utilized his global experiences in telling this story. Richard, a globe-trotting photojournalist from the U.S., meets Lourdes, a lovely Cuban. Unexpectedly, Richard finds himself falling in love. Lourdes, of course, wants a better life, on or off the island--yet, as real life usually dictates, securing her dream is a lot more complex than simply wishing for it. And Richard's world-weary cynicism takes a good flogging. Iyer's first novel pulls at the heart while expanding the mind. Rau{£}l Nin{¤}o

From Library Journal

The title of this first novel by Time magazine essayist Iyer (Falling Off the Map, LJ 5/1/93) comes from a line of Jose Marti's "Two fatherlands I have, Cuba and the night." Indeed, Marti's aura haunts the entire work, from its epigraph to its final sentence when, as the narrator watches the woman he loves smile at another man with a smile unlike any "I could have gotten in my lens," she picks up a book that "looked to be Marti." This is a love story about both person and place. On the one hand, it traces the relationship that develops between an emotionally drained American freelance photographer and a young Cuban woman whose chief sustenance is her dreams. On the other, it is the story of Havana and the resilience of the Cuban people in the late Castro era. The Cuba pictured is a passionate albeit desperate place where sloganeering increases as economic conditions degenerate. As for Richard (the photographer), he learns that passion by itself is not enough, that life requires more than color. A worthy first effort; suitable for academic and public libraries, particularly those serving a Hispanic audience.?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Info