Rachel Kushner - 'Telex From Cuba'

First thing I've read by Kushner. It was highly acclaimed in 2008 when it was released and a finalist for the National Book Award. Naturally, I was skeptical, but every bit of praise for this book is well deserved. The story follows multiple characters in Cuba leading up to the revolution of 1959 which found the US backed Batista overthrown by Fidel Castro. The book reveals tensions between the Cubans that worked in the sugar cane fields run by US expats...sorry, US *immigrants*. Much of the perspectives are through the children of these wealthy families, often having fled the US for various legal reasons, or have lived a life in limbo throughout various Latin and Central American countries.

Kushner's writing fulfills all of the senses. Not a scene passes without her describing the various smells and sounds of the country and its people, about the myriad colors that lend themselves to the landscape. There are lyrical flourishes on every page, such as "the wind gusted like a personality" or "it was an afternoon of time outside of time."

But these subtle flourishes don't allow themselves to dominate the story either. Each character, whether the naive children, drunk housewives, a cabaret dancer, Cuban militants, or a secretive French agitator, are fully formed with reflective, philosophical thoughts bubbling throughout the narrative. Of course, some characters are more receptive to these philosophical inquiries than others that would rather deny the painful truths, and the impending revolution about to take place.

For a debut novel, it is impressive for the amount of detail of the time period that Kushner writes about, especially for a country that has been mostly off limits to Americans for the past half-century.  I'm reading interviews Kushner gave about her writing process. The novel took her six years of research and writing. In an interview with the National Book Foundation, she reveals that her mother and aunts used to live in Cuba. She continues:

I took trips to the old colonies in Cuba and talked to people there about the years before the revolution. I made graphs and timelines, and tried to synthesize the hundreds of books I’d read into categories, until I was able to think clearly about what, among all I’d learned, served my story, at which point I started writing.

This long term, pain-staking research bloomed details that illuminate the story beyond what skimming Cuba's Wikipedia page would do. Specific dates, locations, historical figures, large and small, their hairstyles and sexual preferences, all make their presence known. Naturally, Hemingway makes a couple of appearances, as well as (and more arbitrarily) Jean-Paul Sartre and Céline (though this interview with Kazuo Ishiguro explains her relationship with both).

Finally, one thing that Kushner seems to have wanted to nail into the readers' heads was the idea of documenting life and how it detracts from living it. Everly Lederer is one of the preteens growing up on the island. She refutes her sister's saving of souvenirs, noting that "documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past." Later, when watching "live" TV, she realizes the dichotomy is not so black and white: "Maybe it meant you could experience something and see it as a memory at one and the same time." Not only is the blurring of perception relevant to the blurring of other themes presented throughout the book (sexual attraction, national loyalty, government leaders), but is particularly prescient before Instagram, Twitter, etc., made documenting the present the only way to prove it exists at all.