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ONE HUNDRED BOTTLES
Translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas
Reviewed by Andy Barnes
It has often been written that a good novel can take you on a journey. If that is the case, then One Hundred Bottles is a vivacious drunken stagger around 1990s Havana. It is a place of extraordinary energy combined with terrifying shadows, captured beautifully by Ena Lucía Portela, in her first book to be translated into English. The book centres on the Havana suburb of Verdado. It is a place redolent of past glories. Formerly an affluent area, it is still bedecked in the crumbling fineries of previous decades, but it has become decayed and squalid. The Great and the Good of Havana have long since departed, leaving the houses to the drug users, alcoholics and poor country folk looking for new lives. Into this world enters Z, an overweight woman with appetites for rum, sex and life. She divides her time between Moisés, her physically abusive, alcoholic, older boyfriend, and Linda, a lesbian writer of avant-garde detective fiction with ambitions for the Nobel prize for literature. Z's friends are both dysfunctional and angry. Moisés beats Z frequently, without reason or mercy, Linda shuns her and needs her in confusing cycles. Despite these friendships, Z lives her life in Verdado with an admirable verve, and the book becomes a description of love and death set against a backdrop of rum, sex and fast-living. Although One Hundred Bottles is a literary mauling of Cuba's capital city, it is, nevertheless, a strangely uplifting and appealing book. It is often dark and sinister but, like Z herself, bursts with life and energy. Portela's prose is sharp, witty and darkly comic, and she writes with a fondness for her characters that brings a positivity to what could otherwise be a grim and squalid novel. Portela's portrait of a bruised, bewildered and vivacious Z is also a portrait of a bruised, bewildered and vivacious city, one that Portela apparently loves, even as she can see its flaws.
One Hundred Bottles' mixture of light and shadow is beguiling . Portela's novel works as
both a narrative and an allegory, and Achy Obejas' translation captures the tone perfectly. It's not
a book that makes you fond of Havana, but it does make you fond of Portela's fondness for it, which
is a testament to a very good piece of writing. |
Univ. of Texas Press, paperback, 9780292723320 |