The Distant Marvels

A Picture from 1963 Cuba by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Despite the old adage, I'm a sucker for book covers and the Italian press Europa Editions publishes beautifully designed books.

Picture by Marko Metzinger for The New York Times

There's a shelf dedicated to Europa Editions books at the trusty Mid-Manhattan library, which always draws me in.  And so, earlier this week I left with Chantel Acevedo's The Distant Marvels.

It's written in the same spirit as Isabel Allende's Eva Luna, but opens in Cuba in 1963.  As Hurricane Flora approaches, a group of women are evacuated from their homes to the top floor of a former governor's mansion.  Among these women is María Sirena, an eighty-something former lettora, who was once paid to read stories aloud as men worked in cigar factories.  As the storm rages outside, María Sirena spins an epic family saga.

I'm about a third of the way through and particularly love this passage in which María Sirena remembers her daughter:

"I consider her at fifteen, bookish and romantic then, writing poems on broad hibiscus leaves and floating them in the canals behind our apartment.  At eighteen, she fell in love with Mireya Peña's son, Alejandro, a poet, too, and her appetite for him was so crushing that he became all the food she needed; she lost the plumpness in her arms and dark circles shadowed her eyes.  'He is the best poem I've ever written,' she gushed to me one night, and I called her a little fool, and warned her about poets.  I told her a story about a poet, who died facing the sun, and she laughed and called me ridiculous.  She regained herself - her weight, her senses - when she left Alejandro the night before their wedding.  I got my daughter back, but in trade, I lost Mireya's friendship and earned her dagger eyes for the rest of my life."