I really loved the sound of Kushner's The Flamethrowers, believing, after lots of hype, that it could just be one of those great novels of the 21st century, only for it to somewhat disappoint. But, for some of the ideas, and the sheer ambition put into it, along with the fact that as a person, from the few interviews I've seen, I do like Kushner, and thought I'd turn to her debut novel next time around. Telex from Cuba is equally ambitious - I believe six years in the making and various trips to...

This was well written book. It was a page turner for the first half, but then came to a screeching halt by the second half. I felt it was boring and anti-climactic.However, it was neat to read about this time period, and I have never read ANYTHING about the Cuban revolution. Although it is none of my business, I wonder if the insinuations about Raul and Fidel's sexuality are true.

Told mainly through the reminisces of K.C. Stites, son of the manager of United Fruit Company and Everly Lederer, daughter of the new manager of the US government owned nickel mining operation, this is a very lyrically written novel of privilege, proverty and politics in Cuba in the late 1950's. The author gives an excellent overview of the activities of the Batista and Prio governments of Cuba and the rise of the rebels in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic - not as a history lesson, but to...

I enjoyed reading about the 'drama' of the American families living in Cuba during the 1950's.I especially enjoyed the children.3.5 rating -- (the Political parts of the book did not 'flow' as much for me as the 'personal-relationships' parts of the book did).

This book was mesmerizing- beautifully written and truly evocative of the time and place of the story. Kushner paints an indelible picture of life in the United Fruit company's outpost in Cuba, her words creating a vivid portrait of a way of life in collapse. The characters are wonderfully drawn and Cuba itself acts as a character in the novel. Knowing that Kushner's mother lived through this tumultuous time in Cuba lends even greater reality to the narrative. I picked this book up and could bar...

I recently read Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and fell in love. I have to admit that if I just saw her literary debut, Telex from Cuba on the shelf without reading The Flamethrowers, I probably wouldn't have been interested in reading it. There's no good reason for that other than too many books and too little time, but I am glad that I loved The Flamethrowers so much that I gave this a try.It's just not as good.Which is strange to say because I'd say these books are almost identical in so

This was a fascinating fictional account of the events leading up to the overthrow of the Batista government by Fidel and Raul Castro, and the lives of working Americans in Cuba at that time. It provides a broad, even-handed perspective on the economic, cultural and political dimensions of the Cuban Revolution - plus a visceral sense of Cuban culture, geography and climate.

Have you ever read a book that you knew was technically very good but you still didn't like it very much? That was the experience I had while reading this book. Kushner's prose is stunning, and the backdrop of Cuba and the sugar plantations just before the revolution is one I've never read about before. Yet the book just left me cold.I've thought hard about this and the only thing I can come up with is that the story seemed like it was written in service of telling a history lesson, rather than

Privilege: A Theory Inspired by Rachel KushnerRachel Kushner has done an outstanding job, presenting an informed, intriguing, concise but nuanced explanation for the Cuban Revolution in a highly accomplished work of fiction. Her story, although it references all of these, doesn’t focus on politics, or ideology, or personalities. The dominant theme is privilege and how it manifests itself in its practice and in its demise. And like most good literature, the importance of this theme and the implic...

Rarely do I hate a book. I do admit that there are books that simply do not capture my interest, such as the previous book I have read. But this one is a little different.I checked this book out of the library a few months ago. It has been sitting on my drawer for quite a while now, and so I finally picked it up and started on it. It started quite ok, but it stayed flat. In short, it was quite painful to finish, although I didn't skip the chapters, and faithfully read until the end. When I finis...

Picked this book up because I thought it would be interesting to read about Cuba in that time period. But meh didn't get a long with the book. Still want to read more books about this subject but would read by another author next time.

I wanted to read this one after enjoying The Flamethrowers last year. This one is very different - an impressively detailed recreation of life in Cuba in the 1950s as the revolution was brewing. It tells the stories of an odd mixture of characters, mostly American colonists. The most compelling voices are the children. Inevitably the book is a little uneven, but is well worth reading and an intriguing choice of subject for a first novel.

I so admire Rachel Kushner's writing in her novels the Flamethrowers and the Mars Room, I was very much looking forward to reading this, her first novel about the coming of the Cuban Revolution. It's an accomplished book which tells its story from multiple points of view--mostly focusing on the sons and daughters of American families in Cuba working for United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and the nickel mine which was a joint American-Cuban concern--but also the perspective of an exotic dancer a...

This was a book club pick from the finalists for the National Book Award. I really can't imagine why. While the descriptions of a pre-Castro Cuba were good and the story of the American families interesting, the whole mess with the dancer and her ties to the underworld were a major distraction. I still would like to know what point she was making in having the dancer's name be Rachel K. An author doesn't give her character her own name without some sort of reason and I could never find out what

It took me a very long time to get through this book. Normally, if I am struggling this much, I will move on; I'm not one to force myself through books, life is too short and there's too much to read. But I kept on with this, because I had a sense that Kushner had a particular vision for this -- something very different from what I, as a writer, would try to do; and I wanted to find out what it was, and how she was going to achieve it.Perhaps the most difficult thing about the novel's structure

Pearl Ruled (p8)Daddy swore out loud and rushed to the garage where Hilton kept the company limousine, a shiny black Buick. We had two of them—Dynaflows, with the chromed, oval-shaped ventiports along the front fenders.Dynaflow is a brand of transmission that Buick developed. The car itself was a Buick Roadmaster. If you don't get details such as this right, I lose my sense that you're getting things important to the story, things invisible to me, correct; that means I get the sense that your no...

With language as lush as the tropics itself, Kushner unfolds a political revolution and an embarrassing blotch on American history, described as temptingly as a bountiful buffet spread or a botanical garden run amok.Beginning the book through the eyes of children is a brilliant stroke. The author shows their naïve view of Cuba like someone born into a cult who doesn’t know anything of the outside world. Then we see American families moving to Cuba to improve their place in the class hierarchy, n...

I was going to start this review by saying that this novel gives the lie to anyone who says you can't teach people to write. Of course you can teach people to write. You can teach people to drive, which is a lot harder than writing. You can teach them to build bridges across impossible spaces, put up those massive, bristling skyscrapers in New York and Shanghai, get oil from the desert, make rockets and missiles and sell them to countries worse off than you so they can almost but not quite destr...

Goodreads messes me up when I try to change edition in the midst of writing a review. I just lost my review for this -- second time I've had this sort of thing happen to me! Bah!Anyway, not about to reconstruct entirely tonight, but this is a writer called to my attention by a Goodreads reader enthusiastic about her The Flamethrowers . Shortly thereafter, Telex became available as a special offer. Kushner does a commendable job of bringing together a large cast of characters, each distinctly

The Cuban revolution of the late 1950s as experienced by U.S. families living on the far eastern end of the island & managing U.S. corporate enterprises there--United Fruit's sugarcane operation & a nickel mine owned by the U.S. government. That is, the same people who are primly shocked at any other government's "socialistic" ownership of resources--this inconsistency isn't really taken up here, but many others are.I wasn't really interested in the secondary Rachel/La Maziere relationship, thou...