"Telex From Cuba" by Rachel Kushner ****

• Rochester Arts  & Lectures author, 2015
• Originally published in 2009
• US author
• Debut novel
• Epigraph:  "All is order there, and elegance, pleasure, peace, and opulence."  - Invitation to the Night
• Vocabulary:
• jetsam: things cast overboard deliberately to lighten the load of a ship
• jalousies:  a window made of glass slats or louvers of a similar nature
• zazou:  french resistance youthful bohemians
• Quotes:
• p.37..." Batista had telephoned from Miami, offering to buy all the officers new uniforms.  In return they gave undying loyalty and surrounded the palace with tanks."
• p.38..."She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely."
• p.42..."If her parents ever did get rich, their old selves would hate their new selves, though maybe it wouldn't matter because they would have forgotten their old selves, erased by their new selves, since self was self and there couldn't be more than one in a single body."
• p.43....."Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn't have both."
• p.60..."He liked the diaphanous allure of fishnets.  They were an enticement in the guise of a barrier, like a beaded curtain over a doorway says "come in" not "get out", its beads telegraphing that everything that is inside is enchanted and special."
• p.60..."Her stockings were as material as the sun shadow of a chain link fence on a prison wall."
• p.145..."He'd come and gone without warning,  never explaining what he was up to, not because information was sensitive, but for other reasons, for style and aesthetics, because honesty was so clunky and irrelevant, like a cumbersome piece of furniture."
• p.177..."That's the strange thing about love.  Unless it's returned, it's invisible."
• Notes: 
• Some of the author's 13 year old boy perspectives didn't quite seem authentic
• Review:  This debut novel presented a bit of a conundrum for me.  Set in Cuba during the Prio, then Batista regimes, right up to the revolution led by the Castros, the novel chronicles the politics, the corruption, the class struggle and racism of the era in which the Americans and their sugar plantation culture dominated the island.  Through the reminiscences of a man who was present throughout as a child, the reader becomes acquainted with the inequities, and one might say, the repetitive absurdity of the era.  Overall, the topic, the era, and the story were engrossing.  The primary problem in this novel for me was the use of non-chronological format.  I do not mind the format in some novels, but in this one I found it to be a significant distraction.  I would like to read more by this author to see if her style solidifies.