cover image The Faraway War

The Faraway War

Enrique Clio, . . St. Martin's/Dunne, $24.95 (274pp) ISBN 978-0-312-37958-2

Henry Reeve, a Brooklynite who rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Cuban revolutionary army in the 1870s, is the real-life subject of Clio's underwhelming novel. Disappointingly, Reeve's little-known story is presented as a pared-down rendering of skirmishes and war wounds, with little to say about Reeve's early life, inner life or the larger world around him. What portrait there is of Reeve is contradictory without being skillfully woven enough to be complex: painfully earnest one moment, Reeve is a blood-soaked killing machine the next. Surviving an attempted execution by firing squad after arriving with an American expeditionary force in 1869, Reeve joins the revolutionary army, gains a reputation for bravery and rises through the ranks. Along the way, Reeve receives his sexual initiation from the lusty Ramona and engages in chaperoned hand-holding with Anunciación, but neither woman rises above caricature. The strengths of the book are the descriptions of close combat and some early descriptions of Cuba. But overall, this threadbare narrative is less a novel than a cataloguing of battles. (Apr.)