The Return of Felix Nogara

A Cuban native who writes about the exile experience, Medina serves up his most ambitious--and darkest--work to date in this second novel (after Marks of Birth and his memoir, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood). Poet and intellectual Felix Nogara, like the author, fled his homeland at the age of 12. After the death of the dictator who has ruled the fictional Caribbean island of Barata for many decades, Nogara leaves the U.S., where he is a citizen, and returns to the country of his birth--after 38 years, and with a sense of mission. ""He had... the illusion that his life had a meaning--and that that meaning could be found by recovering a lost history, a lost happiness."" Mart n, a wily and wise cabbie, guides Nogara through Barata's wasted cities, which lack street signs and other civilizing features. Together, they succeed in shooting the head off a statue of the island's patron saint and, eventually, in locating Nogara's mother in a decrepit mental institution. There are touches reminiscent of Garc a M rquez, as when the dictator's worst enemy, the archbishop, is summoned to hear the dying leader's last confession and give him last rites. Lacking the proper candle and oil for this task, the priest accomplishes it with a flashlight and lumbago liniment. Nogara stays in Barata, working as a cabdriver, until his death some years later. But in Medina's bleak, searing vision, little changes in Barata, which remains a country of poverty and desolation, where the future is as fragile as the crumbling edifices of the past. In devoting the first chapter of this novel to a heavily weighted ""history"" of his quasi-fictional island, Medina runs the risk of alienating readers searching for narrative urgency. But as soon as Nogara touches Baratan soil, his perceptions of the bleak landscape and the unleashing of his memories combine to create a moving portrait of a man forever exiled from his heritage. Agent, Elaine Markson. (Sept.)