Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0275
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Pages: 275vii291-276
• Author: James Wilkeyz

BOOK REVIEWs 275

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Ángela Dorado-Otero, Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s

(Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2014) hb vii+291pp. ISBN: 9781855662711

Reviewed by James Wilkey

There is something inherently compelling about analysing the voices of Cuban

writers during the 1990s. On the island, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to

an era of economic devastation known as the ‘Special Period’. Meanwhile, the

geographical shuffling of Cuban authors in exile in the decades following the

Cuban revolution of 1959 generates deep questions about Cuban identity and

memory. In tackling the subject, Ángela Dorado-Otero attempts to demonstrate

‘how Cuban narratives in the 1990s, in response to and influenced by the hard-

ship of the Special Period and the historical circumstances of the country, repre-

sent a turning point in the creation of the Cuban novel’ (p. 2). The book explores

the use of carnivalesque and sexualised depictions of Cuba as a means of chal-

lenging social and political hierarchies in the Cuban state, as well as any notion

of a homogenous Cuban identity.

Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s focuses on six authors who

Dorado-Otero asserts represent a boom of Cuban novelists in the decade:

Reinaldo Arenas, Leonardo Padura, Abilio Estévez, Daína Chaviano, Yanitzia

Canetti and Zoé Valdés. Despite widespread diaspora, all of the authors Dorado-

Otero examines are linked by having spent their formative years in revolutionary

Cuba. Dorado-Otero argues that these authors share a carnivalesque aesthetic

across six respective novels which ‘in turn creates a non-official history, a mem-

ory from the margins, which acts as a form of cultural resistance to monolithic

representations of Cubanness’ (p. 3).

Chapter 1 analyses the hypersexual, carnivalised Cuba of Reinaldo Arenas’

El color del verano (1991). Dorado-Otero describes Arenas’ Cuba as a way of

aggressively engaging in discussion about homosexual oppression in Cuba, while

simultaneously gaining a modicum of revenge against the state. Chapter 2

focuses on Leonardo Padura’s Mascaras (1997). Padura, like Arenas, subverts

traditional notions of culture and identity, but does so through intertextuality

and the use of the transvestite figure. In Chapter 3, Abilio Estévez’s Tuyo es el

reino (1997) is posited as using the form of the novel to explore creation as a

means of challenging all discourse. The final three chapters focus on Daína

Chaviano, Yanitzia Canetti and Zoé Valdés, all female, who, Dorado-Otero

asserts, use erotic discourse as a means through which women can reject objec-

tification and assert agency.

Although interconnected, and intriguing, in their own right, the shift in tone,

style and subject of the final three chapters of Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban