I had to stop. I had to let it settle down. I couldn’t go into written reflection just right after. My emotions were not letting me reflect…not the way I wanted. Not the way I had imagined I would write this review…actually just an opinion on that writing that made me travel to a place I didn’t know – I’ll never know – to a time I didn’t live in, to a world that wasn’t mine, but which I was invited to enter when I started to get immersed in Carlos Eire’s narrative.

I am not going to attempt a kind of academic review – this is just my felt opinion. I am not going to try to characterize the characters in the book, I will not use the traditional structure to provide my opinion about this book. I will just write down some random thought about it: my views, how and what I feel while reading it, what I think I have learned. In short, my personal insight – what I truly believe to be the main purpose of literature – to free the reader from his/her own world , and give him/her freedom to imagine and to consider that written world through his/her own eyes. And this is a reflection without references; my own opinion, and no one else’s. That’s what I will try to convey here. I don’t mean I don’t agree with other reviews and different ways of approaching this narrative. It is just I still haven’t read any. On purpose. I first need to provide my view and then compare it with others. That’s what I’ll do next.

So, it’s now that my reflection starts …or it gets transferred to words.

I could just summarize Eire’s work to one sentence: I really liked the book.

However, I want to go a bit deeper than that. I would like to say that I enjoyed the way the book is written – it’s appealing to me – it sounds real. It feels honest too. It’s human! I appreciate the way Eire conveys his passion and his desolation about his lost life. It has feeling. It feels personal. It brings memories. It incites sympathy. It is the mixture of misery and of good fortune – the mixture life is made of – that really attached me to this life narrative.

I see the author mainly as an observer – an observer of himself – of what he was and what he has become – as well as an observer of the others who were important to him (in that reality). He allows us in that now vanished world and reports with a mist of humour and anger about a life he was stolen from. I think that above all this story is about healing, it’s about trying to leave a past behind – a past that never became future, but that, I am sure, still plays an important part in many people’s present. A past that many of us will never fully understand, not with the same intensity or feeling.

What has stayed with me from the entire plot:

The way Havana is reported – from the wealthy side of Havana to the entirely destroyed Havana – the Havana Eire lived in. He reports about the Havana he got to know. The part of the city and the context he lived in. I imagine those parties and mandatory Sunday Masses. I can relate to a house full of people, coming and going unannounced. And the close connections to relatives and friends. Knowing one, it automatically means you know others. Latin people make, or rather used to make, bonding so much easier. Then we move to the sophisticated countries and we see ourselves behaving in a sophisticated way: we lose the capacity of showing genuine affection or assure the others we care. We no longer hug for nothing and everything (todo y nada), we can’t take you in our car because you can die and then you can sue us; we no longer kiss on the cheek – it’s not in the culture….[these were thoughts that emerged while I was reading some of the passages of the book].

The going away – leaving the home country is always tough; It’s even tougher when you haven’t got a choice. The toughest is, I guess, to leave the others behind a thick glass that suffocates the sound of voices we care about, and makes us die right there and then when at the entrance of an unpredictable future in the promised land.

Leaving is not easy, but staying isn’t either. And if I find the words to express my opinion on this one, I will be arrogant enough to say I totally understood D. Louis’ attitude. Loving is also about being able to let go…to grant others what they think better for themselves. I think that’s what unconditional love is all about [ this is also what I've learned from an expert: my mother]

And a third remark I would like to make on this story is the fact that the author assumes his death…over and over again – but he has never really mentioned re-birth…. or maybe he has… We learn with our experiences, we grow with them. We are what we become. Sometimes a part of us dies, or hibernates in our deepest self. All of this is experience. All of this is living. It makes us what we are, even if we don’t fully conceive it as such.

This is an extraordinary report about a small fraction of the author’s own story. I think the writing has helped him understand himself better. Additionally, it can also help us, the readers, to understand a tiny little bit better of how the vision of some can impact on so many, many souls and with such gravity….but I don’t want to go deeper into this subject…not now anyway!

Above all, this is a life story, and therefore worth reading it. As Prof. Richard Green says: story-telling is also part of the healing process…