A review by jessferg
Loving Che by Ana Menéndez
3.0
My Amazon review: With beautiful imagery and intriguing language, Menendez has created a mysterious and intriguing story about love, family, and revolutionary Cuba.
This enchanting diptych of a novel begins in standard form with the narrator questioning her childhood in Miami and expressing her frustration at the lack of information she is able to get from her grandfather about her past and her parents. When a mysterious package arrives filled with letters and photos, the novel takes a stylistic turn and we are thrust into a wholly different life; the life of an artist in Cuba in the 1950s. In brief and beautifully written vignettes, these "letters" seemingly explain the narrator's mother's life and her clandestine affair with Che Guevara.
A return to the narrator's voice at the end of the novel details a renewed search for her mother using the information that has been revealed in the letters. While at the heart of the matter the question seems to be whether or not the narrator is the daughter of Che Guevara, the narrator focuses on her search for her mother and Guevara seems to be an afterthought.
While the initial change in narrative is slightly jarring, it is reflective of how we remember and of how and what one chooses to tell about ones life. The return of the narrator's voice is a smooth transition and further illuminates the letters and the difficulty in both sharing secrets and yet keeping them. As Teresa writes to her daughter "...life is not a tidy narrative.... We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves."
This enchanting diptych of a novel begins in standard form with the narrator questioning her childhood in Miami and expressing her frustration at the lack of information she is able to get from her grandfather about her past and her parents. When a mysterious package arrives filled with letters and photos, the novel takes a stylistic turn and we are thrust into a wholly different life; the life of an artist in Cuba in the 1950s. In brief and beautifully written vignettes, these "letters" seemingly explain the narrator's mother's life and her clandestine affair with Che Guevara.
A return to the narrator's voice at the end of the novel details a renewed search for her mother using the information that has been revealed in the letters. While at the heart of the matter the question seems to be whether or not the narrator is the daughter of Che Guevara, the narrator focuses on her search for her mother and Guevara seems to be an afterthought.
While the initial change in narrative is slightly jarring, it is reflective of how we remember and of how and what one chooses to tell about ones life. The return of the narrator's voice is a smooth transition and further illuminates the letters and the difficulty in both sharing secrets and yet keeping them. As Teresa writes to her daughter "...life is not a tidy narrative.... We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves."