Qwert and the Wedding Gown

In this sharply original novel, the author's first to appear in English, a Cuban refugee narrates the story of his and his wife's immigration to the United States and his subsequent descent into madness. While Amanda quickly finds work in a costume factory and begins to assimilate, the nameless narrator spends his days on a park bench and hides his face from his wife when she returns home in the evening. The narrator's greatest regret in leaving his homeland was having to forfeit his typewriter (the ``qwert'' of the title represents the first five letters in a row of keys) and with it his dreams of becoming a novelist. Typewriters are just one of the motifs that return to haunt him throughout. The plot is sketchy, and it is often difficult to grasp what is real and what is imaginary, but the narrator's strong and frightening images (an overcoat that grows on him like a skin, gigantic black birds speaking in a strange tongue) carry the reader along on this fast-paced stream-of-consciousness journey. The translation carefully reproduces the stops and starts of madness, a particularly admirable job since the novel includes both the birds' imaginary language and a number of hard-to-follow passages. (July)