Mayra Montero: Dancing to Almendra

Margaret Barno reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to Almendra.

The “Almendra”, translated “almond”, is a slow-paced, sad Latin musical piece popular beginning in the 1950s throughout Central South America and Cuba. It’s rhythmic accents match well with the mambo, a dramatic, beautifully seductive dance.

This tempo is the background music of nightclubs, casinos and backdrop of this intriguing, multifaceted story of the under layers in Havana society in 1957.

Tensions, building among power brokers with links to organized crime figures locally and in the United States, were felt in unusual places: a circus and a zoo.

Lives of people, seemingly disconnected, would forever be entwined and affected.

Add an offbeat, frustrated young news reporter assigned to cover less than newsworthy events, sent to report the death of a hippopotamus at a local zoo, and the stage is set for a dramatic, pulsating novel that is as intense as it is intoxicating.

There is another significant factor, one that is usually somewhere in a book about people: love. When people break accepted mores, all is well. Stray into the territory of another, outside the unwritten “family” rules, and there can be deadly or at least memorable results designed to reinforce the consequences of going astray in affairs of the heart.

Edith Grossman, the 2006 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation winner, does an excellent job at capturing the bawdy language and atmosphere of Havana in the immediate era before the Cuban Revolution.

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Cuban Literature

Best books of 2007

The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors.

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. - Jabari Asim

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Nan A. Talese). A book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. The setting is Bogota, Colombia. Far above politics, right up into high art. - Carolyn See

In Her Absence, by Antonio Munoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other). This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely on a civil servant and his passionate yet painful relationship with his wife of six years. - Brigitte Weeks

Nada, by Carmen Laforet; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Modern Library). After six decades, it has lost none of its power and originality, and we are fortunate to have it in this fine translation. - JY

Dancing to "Almendra", by Mayra Montero; translated by Edith Grossman (FSG). The fictional, gossamer beauty and blood-soaked brutality that personifies Cuba of 1957. - Joanne Omang

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins). Readers will recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Peru. A fable for the entire continent. - Jonathan Yardley

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Latin American Literature

100 Notable Books of 2007

This year's New York Times' 100 Notable Books includes 5 Latin American Books, and Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives made it to The 10 Best Books of 2007 list.

THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.

DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

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Latin American Literature

Mayra Montero - Dancing to 'Almendra'

Lois D. Atwood reviews Cecilia Samartin's Broken Paradise and Mayra Montero's Dancing to 'Almendra'.

In these two novels, life in the tropical paradise of Cuba has fallen apart under either totalitarian or communist rule. Dancing to ‘Almendra’ is set in Batista’s Havana, where gangsters run all the casinos; Broken Paradise on the idyllic island whose society Castro is restructuring.

Dancing . . . is a thriller about mobsters, zoo keepers, casino and carnival performers, pimps — and Joaquin Porrata, a clueless young journalist. Sent to cover the killing of a hippopotamus, he meets Juan Bulgado, a lion keeper who also runs the zoo’s slaughterhouse, and learns that the killing was a warning to Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia. When Joaquin makes the connection in a news story, he becomes a danger to those in power. Read More

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Cuban Literature

Joanne Omang reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to "Almendra".

An escaped hippopotamus has been killed at the Havana zoo, but cub reporter Joaquín Porrata would much rather be writing about the death in New York that same day of Mafia executioner Umberto Anastasia. Then a zoo worker reveals a connection. It's 1957, and we are instantly hooked into this gripping novel about the beautiful, steaming, rotten hulk of pre-Castro Cuba, where very little is the way it seems.

The rebels are in the mountains and setting off car bombs downtown, but Porrata is a "cherubic-looking boy" whose meager ambition is to move from covering Havana's pulsing nightlife to writing "court news, for example, or feature articles about the airport." But because of a benign childhood encounter with gangster Meyer Lansky, he's also keeping notes on the Mafia figures whose grim hold on the island depends on remaining officially invisible. Not a good omen for a nosy young reporter.

Author Mayra Montero, Cuban by birth and now a newspaper columnist in Puerto Rico, knows that journalists survive in corrupt and violent places by writing between the lines, reporting a truth that's invisible except to those who know the code. Not for Porrata the open commitment of the couple who give the book its title when he sees them dancing to the sad song "Almendra" ("The Almond"): "There was something solid and distinctive in the honored way they followed the rhythm. There was no hope for anyone else." Read More

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Cuban Literature

Review: Dancing to "Almendra" by Mayra Montero

In a time long, long ago before the nation state of the Bahamas captured American media attention due to one Anna Nicole Smith, another Caribbean country riveted our gaze: Cuba. Today Cuba boils down to the three C’s: cigars, Castro, and classic cars. In the 50s, as Mayra Montero suggests in her sixth novel, Dancing to "Almendra", Cuba’s national identity was intertwined with our own.

Cuban-born novelist Montero creates a delightful narrative of Havana in 1957. An entertainment reporter for the local rag, Joaquin Porrata, is assigned to cover the brutal slaughter of a hippo at the Havana Zoo. While covering this story, the zookeeper hints that the animal’s death was actually a message for Mafioso Umberto “Albert” Anastasia who was killed the same day in a New York barbershop. Porrata realizes that the hippocide could be an indicator of the turf war emerging between new restaurateurs, hoteliers, and casino operators in the plush and flush nation.

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Cuban Literature

Dancing to “Almendra” by Mayra Montero

The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it’s a wonder more stories haven’t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble of the Revolution, all playing out in a gorgeous city. Is there more in the way of material than this? A great narrative, an elegant and charismatic cast, a setting as alluring as any in the world; but we have little to show for it, in English anyway, aside from a slight Graham Greene novel and a few scenes in “The Godfather, Part II.” And here is Mayra Montero, a Cuban woman now living in Puerto Rico, and “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” her ninth novel, lovingly translated by Edith Grossman: a flawless little book with a deceptively light touch, that covers exactly those years.

Montero’s novel is narrated by a man named Joaquín Porrata, a 22-year-old reporter living in Havana during the last days of Batista, who shows up for work one morning and finds he’s been assigned the story of a hippopotamus that has escaped from the zoo and been shot to death. As it happens, that same night the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber’s shop in New York City, and from a rather strange little zookeeper named Juan Bulgado (or Johnny Angel, or Johnny Lamb: in Havana even a zookeeper can dream), Porrata discovers that the two killings are related. Rebuffed by his boss, who wants to keep him on the entertainment beat, he takes his notes to a rival paper, which sends him first through the Cuban underworld, then to New York and then to the upstate town of Apalachin, where a mob summit has been interrupted by the police, though not quickly enough to spare Anastasia a death sentence from his peers. Along the way Porrata encounters a woman named Yolanda, a small-town refugee who ran away with the circus, where she lost her arm serving as the model in a magician’s sword-through-a-box trick. She’s rumored to have a lover of her own, Santo Trafficante — himself a Mafia boss and a very scary man. Nevertheless Porrata pursues her as he pursues the story, and winds up getting them both, though not without being roughed up a few times along the way. In fact, between the animals in the zoo and the mobsters running the casinos, the book gets very bloody.

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Latin American Literature

Deep Purple by Mayra Montero

Review of Mayra Montero's Deep Purple

There is a profusion of awards in the current literary marketplace, many of them little known. In terms of publicity, there are only a few that attract the attention of the general public. These are the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has the advantage of the Nobel "brand" and association with the inevitable controversy over the winner of its sibling award for "Peace"; the Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded in the largest market for English-language literature and also has well-established brand recognition; and England’s Man Booker Prize (known usually, no doubt to the distress of its new sponsor, just as the "Booker"), which generates an extraordinary amount of international coverage - even in the United States, whose writers are just about the only ones in the world not eligible.
Smaller awards such as the Sonrisa Vertical and the Bellwether Prize may never get the attention of the general media, but they do serve a useful function. Of course, there’s the prize money - always welcome to a struggling author - but more importantly, they provide an imprimatur of quality, marking the work as an outstanding representative of a particular type. The Book of Dead Birds won the Bellwether Prize before publication, so is able to advertise the fact on its dustcover, along with an approving quote from Barbara King solver attesting to the lyricism and intelligence of the book. For those unfamiliar with the prize, the flap informs the browsing book-buyer that the Bellwether is awarded to a work that "displays social responsibility," indicating something of Brandeis’ subject matter.
The prize won by Mayra Montero’s Deep Purple, however, is well outside the bounds of "social responsibility." The Sonrisa Vertical (its amusing name means "Vertical Smile") is a Spanish international prize for erotic fiction, won by Montero after the initial publication of Púrpura profunda in 2000. However, the prize is not advertised on the dustcover of the novel, which prefers to quote praise for her earlier works from the "quality press," including the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. This strategy of not mentioning an award may be a move by the publishers to avoid any taint of a "lesser genre" - particularly erotic fiction - and instead promote the intellectual and literary qualities of the work. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time an author was slightly embarrassed about an endorsement; witness Jonathan Franzen’s famous reaction to his selection in Oprah’s Book Club.

You can find the full review here

Buy Deep Purple at Amazon.com

Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero

Review of Mayra Montero's Captain of the Sleepers

Unless you have a taste for graphic depictions of necrophilia, you will never feel totally at ease reading Captain of the Sleepers in public. ("She was naked, perfumed and dry, totally dry, and I'd bet not as cold as and much less rigid than anyone would have suspected," begins the offender's tender recollection of the act.) Which will complicate things a bit, because the novel--the seventh by Cuban-born author Mayra Montero--is too engrossing to put down just to avoid inquisitive glances.

While this marks Montero's first foray into postmortem sex, both her fiction and nonfiction have always engaged deeply with life's darker passions. As a journalist in Puerto Rico (to which her family immigrated in the 1960s and where she has lived ever since), she covered the bloody coup d'états and revolutions in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the 1970s and '80s. Montero's first novel, The Braid of the Lovely Moon, published in 1987 and named a finalist for the prestigious Premio Herralde prize, delved into voodoo and the overthrow of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. And the work for which she is best known, her erotic fiction--notably the novels The Last Night I Spent With You and Deep Purple--typically uses lust to explore, in the author's words, "anguish about death." Captain of the Sleepers is no departure from that tradition.

You can find the full review here.

Buy Captain of the Sleepers at Amazon.com

Cuban writer Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952, but has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a weekly column in El Nuevo Dia newspaper. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards.

The writer and his translator - Mayra Montero and Edith Grossman

The Washington Post published last Sunday a conversation between translator Edith Grossman and the Cuban novelist Mayra Montero.

Grossman is a best known Spanish to English translator, including works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ariel Dorfman, Álvaro Mutis and Cervantes.
She as translated some of Montero's novels ("The Last Night I Spent with You/La última noche que pasé contigo", "Deep Purple/Purpura Profundo" and "Captain of the Sleepers/El Capitan de los Dormidos").
You can find the article here.

Find Edith Grossman's Translations at Amazon.com