Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.2.0270
• Pages: 270-271
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Author: Sophie M. Lavoie

270 BOOK REVIEWS

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 10.2 WInter 2018

María Elena Llana, An Address in Havana/Domicilio Habanero: Selected

Short Stories. Trans. Barbara D. Reiss (Chico, CA: Cubanabooks, 2014),

228pp. paperback. ISBN: 9780982786031

Reviewed by Sophie M. Lavoie

An Address in Havana brings together, in a bilingual edition, the most well-

known stories by Cuban short-story master, María Elena Llana, for the first time

for English-language audiences. The stories have been skilfully translated by US

academic and literary translator Barbara D. Reiss, who has worked on Llana’s

stories since her doctorate on three Cuban women writers, received in 1999.

Reiss had previously published the stories ‘The Rooms’ and ‘A Five-Hundred

Year Old Rum’ in Cuba on the Edge, an anthology of Cuban writing edited by

Mary Berg in 2007.

A journalist, screenwriter and professor of journalism born in 1936, María

Elena Llana has been publishing short stories since 1965 in her home country,

where she has developed quite a reputation as a writer, as confirmed by her

eightieth-birthday celebration marked nationally by the Cuban National Union

of Writers and Artists in 2016. Llana’s second collection of short stories, Casas

del Vedado (Houses of the Vedado) received the Cuban critics’ national prize in

1984. She is a writer whose style is likened to the most famous writers of the

Latin American Boom, and Julio Cortázar, especially. Academic studies in

English about Llana have been limited, possibly because of the inaccessibility of

her work to scholars in that language and, more generally, the marginalisation

of women’s writing in Cuba and Latin America.

The book opens with a short introduction by Mirta Yañez, a distinguished

specialist of Cuban literature, who situates Llana’s prose within the wider con-

text of Cuban literary production since the Cuban Revolution. Barbara Reiss,

the translator, also includes her own introduction to the collection which pro-

vides justification for some of the complicated choices she made as a translator

in the difficult work of rendering Llana’s precise prose into English. Indeed,

Reiss’ translation received first place in the Best Fiction Book Translation cate-

gory at Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards in 2016.

Llana’s literary world is filled with ghosts, goblins, strange coincidences and

happenings. For example, the story ‘In The Family’ centres around the intriguing

presence of the family’s deceased relatives who live in the large mirror that has

been in the family house for years. Llana makes the eccentricities a part of daily

life, a daily life that she also describes in all its complexities. In ‘On Returning’,

she explores the complicated relationship of those who leave with the island: