Synopses & Reviews
Award-winning storyteller Pablo Medina's new novel is a radiant journey through the mind of Amadeo Terra, a Cuban cigar factory worker confined in a Florida hospital after a stroke has left him paralyzed. His body no longer works, but his mind is very much alive, as is his ruthless and audacious wit. His only human contact is with the callous nurse who constantly scolds him, the orderly who barely acknowledges him, and the nun who prays for Amadeo's salvation while he fantasizes about what's under her habit. One day Nurse feeds him mango from a baby-food jar a departure from the usual bland mush and the taste of it on his tongue brings memories of his life in Havana flooding back. Once a master cigar roller in Cuba and an imperious patriarch of enormous appetites, Amadeo now confronts the long-buried facts of his previously unexamined life. The Cigar Roller is an evocative portrait of a man whose life once governed unapologetically by his most base urges is now reduced mercilessly to its most basic functions.
Review
"A lovely novel, well worth the sadness and claustrophobia evoked by its hermetic setting." Miami Herald
Review
"In the end, you'll be left wondering if your own reading impulses don't share something in common with those that push Amadeo to the edge and his ultimate demise." South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Review
"Medina writes with exquisite detail and manages to sustain interest in a basically static situation." Library Journal
Synopsis
This award-winning storyteller's new novel is a radiant journey through the mind of Amadeo Terra, a Cuban cigar factory worker confined in a Florida hospital after a stroke has left him paralyzed.
About the Author
Pablo Medina was born in Havana, Cuba, where he lived the first twelve years of his life, and moved with his family to New York City in 1960. Since then, he has lived and written in a number of North American cities. He is the author of several works of poetry and prose, most recently The Cigar Roller: A Novel . Forthcoming in April 2005 is Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo, a bilingual collection of poems. A Trumpet Sounds is his first published dramatic work. His poetry and prose have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies in the United States and abroad and he has received many awards, among them fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Cintas Foundation, and the state councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Currently on the writing faculty of New School University in New York City, he also teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.