A Greek Love

 

A Greek Love / Zoé Valdés
trans. from the Spanish by David Frye
NY: Arcade Publishing, c2023.
104 p.

This was a chance discovery; the cover imagery and the setting really got me! It's another Spanish read, but this time from Cuba. 

Zé is a teenager in Communist Cuba, who hangs around the docks and has a fling with a young Greek sailor. Long after his ship has sailed, she realizes she's pregnant. The book opens as she's telling her parents, a dangerous prospect with her violently abusive father's response. He beats her and her mother badly, with the rest of the tenants of their apartment block pretending nothing is happening (as usual). But this time they escape, running into the street and ending up at the apartment of Osiris, a friend of Zé's who also happens to be a middle aged prostitute. But Osiris takes them in and cares for them, until the second part of the book begins, when they all leave Havana to move to the town of Matanzas, to live with Zé's aunt.

Years later, Zé and her son Petros, now a famed musician, are going to travel to Greece for a performance. Zé is going with him if they can get the required permissions from the government, and although they haven't really said so, they are going to try to find Petros' father, a man whom Zé has never forgotten and who changed her life completely. 

They get to Greece. They find Petros' father. It's an anticlimax. They wander around Greece a bit more and think about having to return to life in Cuba. The End. 

I thought this book was fabulous for most of it. The last couple of chapters are abrupt and the ending trails off. It doesn't feel like there was any closure to the story for the reader, or even for Zé. What now? Is she going to defect? To go back to Cuba? How will her life change now that's she met her old lover and it was no big deal? I feel like this would be a huge turning point for her, and wish we could find out what happened! 

It's too bad that I felt let down by the conclusion, because I was impressed with the rest of it. The male violence and the female resistance to it were powerful. The household of women in Matanzas was great: Osiris and Zé's mother end up as a couple despite social condemnation of same sex relationships, they are a bit suspect in the government's eyes. Her academic aunt stands up for all of them all the time. All these characters are wonderful and the settings were lush, evocative, beautiful. I was engaged in their life stories and just wanted more. I may explore some of this author's other work now that I have found her, though, as I enjoyed her style a lot.