Zoé Valdés
Café Nostalgia
Zoé Valdés
Zoe Valdes was born in Havana (Cuba) in the revolutionary year of 1959. The revolution has marked her life significantly why due to her open disapproval of Fidel Castro’s regime she had to emigrate. Since 1995 she lives in Paris and she became one of the most famous Cuban political emigrants. In Cuba her novels are prohibited although Cubans secretly read them. She belongs to the group of most important Latin-American writers.
Her blogsite: http://zoevaldes.net/2009/03/24/noticias-editoriales/
From the accompanying text
Although Cfe Nostalgia is a migrant novel, the readers gain from it few very important lessons about the life on the island, where economically deprived young people inject rum into their vanes to get the thrill and where girls disguise the consequences of wild sexual parties with illegal abortion instead of with contraception. Sex and erotic are important dimensions of Valdes’ writing; she says her literature is nothing but a way of public exposing. Otherwise she says the erotic has lost it’s magic in Cuba. The only thing Cubans have left to save their lives is sex. Just because Fidel Castro prohibited prostitution Cuba has changed into world brothel. With this move even the prostitution on the island as well as many other things transformed above all to a form of anti-government protest.
by Marko Jen¹terle
translated by Nina Koviè
Nina Koviè translates from and into Spanish, French, and Portuguese. In her bibliography there are around 30 literary translations.
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