Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway

Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1930s Cuba, this ambitious but ultimately disappointing debut fictionalizes Ernest Hemingway's adventures in Havana during the early part of his career. The novel begins with a Cuban-American journalist trying to unearth clues about his grandfather, Javier Lopez Angulo's, friendship with Hemingway. A young Harvard graduate, Angulo accidentally insults Hemingway in a bar and narrowly avoids getting into a fistfight with him-all in the space of one page. As swiftly as the incident flares and fizzles, Javier befriends the enigmatic author, accompanying him on fishing trips and drinking binges and eventually becoming involved in a love triangle with him and an unhappily married American named Jane. Despite these intriguing turns, the novel is surprisingly bland. The characters never come to life, and Estrada's portrayal of Hemingway is a shallow caricature rather than a nuanced character study. Estrada, the founder of Hispanic magazine and the editor-in-chief of Vista, does a fine job capturing the Cuban culture and the people's anxiety leading up to the bloody coup of 1933, but the book's static prose and lack of emotional depth keeps it from truly engrossing the reader.