A review by leavingsealevel
Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
3.0
Oh I have lots of thoughts on this one.
First, it has come to my attention that I lack the ability to detect irony in literature. A couple of years ago, I read and thoroughly despised [b:The Last September|195990|The Last September|Elizabeth Bowen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320390978s/195990.jpg|2054543], on account of its "weepy nostalgia for a dying colonial regime" or something along those lines. The other day my friend (and she's a lit professor, so she knows these things) clued me in to the fact that said weepy nostalgia is supposed to be *ironic* (like hipsters).
So I will approach Telex from Cuba with the understanding that perhaps its characters' nostalgia for la united fruit co (read the Neruda poem of that title, btw) in Batista's Cuba is ironic too. That writing a novel in which (neo) colonizers sit around sipping drinks and worrying about the rebels is not in fact always an act of nostalgia for colonialism on the part of the author. This is so interesting and so problematic. I mean, on one hand I believe that a potential role for the privileged storyteller is to show the ugliness of a system of oppression by telling stories of the privileged actors in that system. Show their absurdity, their ridiculous wealth, their contradictions, the way the system warps *them*, too! On the other hand, here and in [b:The Last September|195990|The Last September|Elizabeth Bowen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320390978s/195990.jpg|2054543] (and in plenty of other books I'm sure), it feels uncomfortably close to irony as a cover for a little bit of true nostalgia for that privileged world--that dying colonial regime.
My father was a little USian kid in Latin America in the 1950s (not Cuba, I'll point out. and not as colonial a life, I like to believe). Perhaps on account of that and on account of the fact that I also lived there as a child, the excesses portrayed in this book make me incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe they're supposed to...if Kushner is being all ironic and writing to expose those excesses. In an interview with Powells, she says:
..also, thanks to one of my wonderful students for loaning me her copy!
First, it has come to my attention that I lack the ability to detect irony in literature. A couple of years ago, I read and thoroughly despised [b:The Last September|195990|The Last September|Elizabeth Bowen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320390978s/195990.jpg|2054543], on account of its "weepy nostalgia for a dying colonial regime" or something along those lines. The other day my friend (and she's a lit professor, so she knows these things) clued me in to the fact that said weepy nostalgia is supposed to be *ironic* (like hipsters).
So I will approach Telex from Cuba with the understanding that perhaps its characters' nostalgia for la united fruit co (read the Neruda poem of that title, btw) in Batista's Cuba is ironic too. That writing a novel in which (neo) colonizers sit around sipping drinks and worrying about the rebels is not in fact always an act of nostalgia for colonialism on the part of the author. This is so interesting and so problematic. I mean, on one hand I believe that a potential role for the privileged storyteller is to show the ugliness of a system of oppression by telling stories of the privileged actors in that system. Show their absurdity, their ridiculous wealth, their contradictions, the way the system warps *them*, too! On the other hand, here and in [b:The Last September|195990|The Last September|Elizabeth Bowen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320390978s/195990.jpg|2054543] (and in plenty of other books I'm sure), it feels uncomfortably close to irony as a cover for a little bit of true nostalgia for that privileged world--that dying colonial regime.
My father was a little USian kid in Latin America in the 1950s (not Cuba, I'll point out. and not as colonial a life, I like to believe). Perhaps on account of that and on account of the fact that I also lived there as a child, the excesses portrayed in this book make me incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe they're supposed to...if Kushner is being all ironic and writing to expose those excesses. In an interview with Powells, she says:
I suppose you could say the book is about a lost world. And depending upon who you are and what you're looking for, you could read it and say, "They had it coming." But not everyone has read it this way, particularly those who know and loved this lost world and are grateful to be able to revisit it in the pages of a book.I want no nostalgia for that world, not even nostalgia that is actually irony (and that quote doesn't sound particularly ironic, does it?). I don't want to love the lost world. I want to love Latin America TODAY, the world(s) where people have struggled for justice and sometimes won, and where those struggles are still going on. To his credit, I think my father feels the same way to some extent--a greater extent than any white character in Telex from Cuba, though probably not to the degree I do. I'm giving him a copy for Christmas...partly so I can ask him, "so did this book make you feel nostalgic or really pissed?"
..also, thanks to one of my wonderful students for loaning me her copy!