Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In the wake of his father's premature death, Jose Cemi comes of age in a turn of the century Cuba described in the Washington Post as "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes."
Synopsis
A classic of modern literature, Paradiso was first published in Cuba in 1966 and quickly hailed as a masterpiece by such eminent writers as Julio Cort zar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Written by Cuba's most important poet, it tells the story of Jos Cem , who, in the wake of his father's premature death, comes of age in turn-of-the-century Cuba, "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes" (Washington Post). Weaving the exhilarations and defeats of love into extraordinary erotic verbal tapestries, Lezama Lima narrates Cem 's search for his dead father and for an understanding of love and the powers of the mind.
Both an archetype and a microcosm of Cuban society, Paradiso is as perceptive and psychologically intricate as Proust's vision of France, and as vigorous and sometimes corroded as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.