Qwert and the Wedding Gown FROM THE PUBLISHER
An unemployed Cuban refugee's detailed account of his slide from promising novelist to vagabond, ending in temporary insanity. A prize-winning novel.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
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)
Library Journal
This novel by Cuban-born American writer Huidobro was first published in Mexico in 1975 as Desterrados al Fuego (literally, Exiles into Fire ) and received Mexico's Primera Novela award. The new title for this translation refers to valued possessions left behind in Cuba; the narrator, a writer, left his typewriter while Amanda, his elegant wife, left her wedding gown. On their arrival in America, the two are given ill-fitting and shabby donated overcoats. As symbols, the typewriter and the gown, as well as the overcoats--which almost become characters themselves--are interwoven throughout the novel, which offers a sometimes humorous and sometimes oblique narration of the couple's new life in New York City. This philosophical novel has the existentialist flavor of Sartre and a touch of magical realism. Highly recommended for libraries with Latino and contemporary Latin American literature collections.--Mary Margaret Benson, Lin field Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Virgil Suarez
"A powerful and intense novel...Huidobro has a special gift for the language of dementia, which he portrays magnificently in this book...its rightful place is among such classics s The Stranger by Albert Camus, Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre and, more recently, The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind." -- Philadelphia Enquirer
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