Rhythm & Revolt

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Colombian-born jazz and literary critic Breton has compiled 25 short stories representing the best in Caribbean fiction from the 1920s to the present. Here are Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott and the renowned authors Ana Lydia Vega, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas and others both famous and not so. With unflinching honesty, this anthology illustrates the region's duality. The chaos born of poverty and revolution-and the moral chaos that accompanies it-is played out in Lino Novs Calvo's ``The Cow on the Rooftop,'' in which a mother kills her own son rather than let him take away her only source of food. To the boy's father, she writes, ``I think we all have a cork in our soul to prevent us from sinking, especially if we are Cuban.'' But there is also great beauty and passion entwined with the land itself and reflected in the region's mythology, music and tradition-or, as in Ren Depestre's gorgeous ``Hallelujah for a Woman-Garden,'' the beauty of the woman and the land are one. Ultimately, what makes this anthology most compelling is the evidence of individual resources that enable characters to escape the hostility of an external landscape while retaining the beauty of an internal one. (July)