cover image El Libro de la Realidad

El Libro de la Realidad

Arturo Arango. TusQuets, $17.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-84-8310-165-0

Cuban-born Arango (b. 1955) served nine years as an editor and director of the fine Havana-based cultural magazine Casa de las Americas. He is also a short-story writer whose most recognized piece, ""Lista de espera"" (""Waiting Room""), was made into a well-received film last year by Cuban director Juan Carlos Tabio. This anguished, meditative coming-of-age tale, set in Cuba around the time of Che Guevara's death in 1967, unfolds primarily inside the minds of eight adolescents. While engaged in a secretive and chillingly competitive period of testing and training for an elite squadron intended to spread the Cuban revolution to foreign shores, the youth struggle to put selfless political idealism before their own comfort and happiness. The perilous guerrilla training exercises severely test the teens' characters, and their relationships grow subtly more complex as they painfully shift alliances that involve lovers, family, friends, and patriotic ideals. Despite the novel's focus on soldiering and the cover photo of Guevara tattooed on a woman's shoulder, this is less a political novel than one about the crises of growing up quickly in exciting times. Recommended for bookstores and the fiction collections of academic and public libraries where tastes run toward serious, contemplative fiction. Bruce Jensen, Silver Falls Lib./Oregon State Lib., Salem