A sharp, bitterly funny Cuban novel told through the voice of Yocandra.

Yocandra is a young woman trying to live, desire, write, eat, remember, and keep some private self intact amid the emotional wreckage of post-revolutionary Havana. The prose has the heat of confession but not the softness: sex, hunger, politics, exile fantasies, failed men, literary ambition and daily rationing all arrive in the same breath.

Valdés writes with a kind of glamorous fury — comic, bruised, melodramatic on purpose, and deeply alert to the theatre of deprivation. The book is political without becoming dutiful: it is about Castro’s Cuba, yes, but also about the body under pressure, about feminine rage, about making literature out of humiliation, boredom, appetite and survival. Good for readers of Reinaldo Arenas, Cristina García, Clarice Lispector’s more feverish descendants, and anyone interested in women writing against state mythology from inside the mess of daily life.

First Australian edition published by Text Publishing, 1997.  Translated into English by Sabina Cienfuegos. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and handling to the paperback cover.