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A review by tonyhightower
The Messenger by Mayra Montero, Edith Grossman
4.0
This imagined love story between the great Enrico Caruso and a Chinese-Cuban local is based on an actual event, an bomb that went off while Caruso was performing Aida at the Teatro Nacional in June of 1920, and which caused him to flee into the street and disappear for a week, fearing for his life.
This book comes in two parts: the first half is mostly setup, explaining the woman (Aida Cheng)'s patchwork personal history, and how her family managed to meld the spirituality of both China and Cuba into some kind of earthy herbal cocktail. It delves a little into Caruso's past, and how he wound up coming to Cuba to get away from the dark forces in Italy and New York that he felt were following him, but Aida Cheng is clearly the protagonist, and though she's a simple woman, Mayra Montero writes a great amount of depth into her emotions. This is a character whose feelings start just below the skin and run very deep.
The second half of the book, after the explosion, when Aida and Enrico go into hiding, is where the book takes off. Dream sequences bleed into each other as if the reader has been affected by some of the spells that are constantly being thrown about. Aida and Enrico cling to each other through their dark swampy ordeal like animals huddled against an oncoming storm. They get help from the most powerful people in their respective worlds, and it's almost enough to get them to safety. But Enrico has a wife already, and Aida Cheng has no idea about the world outside of Cuba, and the ending, while not bleak, seems to have been foretold by the spirits all along.
This is a murky, uneven, sweaty book, that will make you feel like you're constantly waking up out of a surreal and slightly harrowing dream. No knock on the translation, but I'd like to read this in the original Spanish at some point.
This book comes in two parts: the first half is mostly setup, explaining the woman (Aida Cheng)'s patchwork personal history, and how her family managed to meld the spirituality of both China and Cuba into some kind of earthy herbal cocktail. It delves a little into Caruso's past, and how he wound up coming to Cuba to get away from the dark forces in Italy and New York that he felt were following him, but Aida Cheng is clearly the protagonist, and though she's a simple woman, Mayra Montero writes a great amount of depth into her emotions. This is a character whose feelings start just below the skin and run very deep.
The second half of the book, after the explosion, when Aida and Enrico go into hiding, is where the book takes off. Dream sequences bleed into each other as if the reader has been affected by some of the spells that are constantly being thrown about. Aida and Enrico cling to each other through their dark swampy ordeal like animals huddled against an oncoming storm. They get help from the most powerful people in their respective worlds, and it's almost enough to get them to safety. But Enrico has a wife already, and Aida Cheng has no idea about the world outside of Cuba, and the ending, while not bleak, seems to have been foretold by the spirits all along.
This is a murky, uneven, sweaty book, that will make you feel like you're constantly waking up out of a surreal and slightly harrowing dream. No knock on the translation, but I'd like to read this in the original Spanish at some point.