I Gave You All I Had

Winsome 16-year-old Cuca Martinez, the heroine of this exuberant Cuban anti-romance, is newly arrived in 1950s Havana from the Cuban countryside, working as a tenement housemaid. When her roommates, good-natured and rambunctious whores La Mechunga and La Puchunga, introduce her to their favorite nightclub in the city of sensual delights, Cuca falls for lounge lizard Juan ""Uan"" Perez, who teaches her to dance and kiss but loses interest when she resists his further advances. Eight years later, Cuca, still a virgin, is overjoyed when Uan reenters her life. The two lovers indulge in a marathon of steamy sex and set up house, but Uan's ties to the mob hasten his departure on the eve of the revolution, his parting gift to the pregnant Cuca a mysterious dollar bill. Cuca and her two ""sluttish aunts,"" La M. and La P., live on in the ruined city where poverty and degradation reign, raiding the black market to provide for Cuca's child, Maria Regla, who quickly becomes a bumptious young Communist. Thirty-six years later, the mob sends Uan, who has been living the good life in Miami, back to Havana to retrieve the dollar bill, key to a Swiss bank account. The reunion of the star-crossed lovers is both pitiful and hilarious, with now-toothless and malnourished Cuca enthusing over Uan's face-lift. Amazingly, the couple rekindle their passion, but their joy is curtailed when Uan is seized by the secret police and Cuca falls ill. Vald s (Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada) won Spain's prestigious Planeta Prize for this novel, and deservedly so; she skillfully infuses her Rabelaisian ode to pre-Castro Havana with biting satire aimed at the repressive regime. In this English-language edition, translator Benabid captures with colloquial ease the pulsating rhythms of Vald s's ebullient prose. (Nov.)