Review: ‘Dreaming in Cuban’

It’s not essential to have read “Dreaming in Cuban” to enjoy “Vanishing Maps,” as key plot points — including the four-day affair matriarch Celia del Pino had in 1934, the year before her marriage — are reestablished in the new novel. After her lover, Gustavo, returned to Spain, Celia wrote him a single letter, which was never answered. She continued to write letters for the next 25 years, but never mailed them and continued to wear the drop-pearl earrings he gave her. In the final scene of “Dreaming in Cuban,” having suffered incalculable bereavements and disappointments, Celia swims out to sea, removes the earrings, and lets them go. In an interview included with the novel’s 25th anniversary edition, García confessed that, like her readers, she wasn’t sure whether Celia returned alive from that swim. But sometime since, García decided to pluck her out of the water and continue her story.

In an early chapter of “Vanishing Maps,” Celia, now 90, is in the hospital recovering from a ruptured colon. When she dutifully takes her pills, the nurse rewards her “with a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen. ‘To write back to that lover of yours,’ he teased her. ‘You’re never too old for romance!’ ”

Just a few weeks earlier, Celia finally received a letter from Gustavo saying he’s been in love with her all along, and now inviting her to come to Spain. Hotel romance looks a little different at 90 than it did at 25, but what has she got to lose? As she tells him when he picks her up in the Granada airport, ‘“I need a cafecito first. Then we’ll jump off a cliff together.’”

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Though two of Celia’s three children are dead, Felicia is sticking around as a very active ghost. The surviving sibling, Lourdes, has become a hero of expat Cubans in Miami and is running for mayor. Celia’s grandson Ivanito is both a brilliant translator and the most popular drag queen in Berlin. Granddaughter Irina has become “the brassiere queen of Rus­sia,” living in a penthouse and eating caviar — and she is about to discover a long-lost identical twin sister.

When Pilar, the one granddaughter who has continued the line, having had a son with a major Japanese artist, takes her precocious little boy to visit her drag queen cousin in Berlin, and the reunited twins just happen to be there too, a joyous meeting occurs, with the ghost of Felicia — Ivanito’s mother — on hand to deepen the mother-son connection that is so important in the book. As Pilar puts it, watching her son sleep:

“Azul twitched beside me, his lips silently moving, a miniature replica of his father. I longed to dream what he dreamt, fly with him to wherever he flew. But there were things I would never know about him. And these unknown things would multiply with each passing day, each passing year, until we became loving, receding strangers to each other — a mother-and-son mystery.”

As moments of wisdom thread through the madcap, magical realist scenes, García’s reunion with her characters becomes a party worth attending. With a group excursion to Cuba in the works — and with the propensity of deceased characters to remain in play — there’s some chance this isn’t the last we’ll see of them.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”