The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez translated into English by Frank Wynne

 

One one trip on my literary journey around the world, I traveled this weekend to Cuba. The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez translated into English by Frank Wynne and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions is a micro portrait of a Cuban family in a society struggling to survive, learning to manage ´the art of scarcity´ from an early age.

Survival happens to most of us, no matter the political system we are surviving to, but some political worlds make the survival harder than the other. The Cuban society where the family described in the book is living is corrupt, at the mercy of those counting then money. Those working for money cannot decide anything, not even the smallest steps of their fate. The mother has a degenerative disease, one of the sons is in the last months of the compulsory military service, another son is deeply disappointed with the enacted socialism and often thinks of the betrayal of the ideals as personified by Che Guevara, the daughter abandoned her studies to work in a hotel.

Each of the characters in the book are given, one by one, a voice. Their are our ears and eyes, describing what they experience and hear, what happens to them. The prose is succint, personal, allowing social observations - like the obsession for tourism as the only source of significant revenue on the island, or the corruption chain within various factories and societies - as a way to understand the characters, and not for the sake of the social and political criticism only.

The chapters, each of them, do fit as short stories, but we need all of them together to tell the whole story.

I liked the writing and the story, not romanticized and very direct in both social and literary terms and would be curious to explore more writings by this author, maybe in the original Spanish as well.

Rating: 4 stars