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Please contact Barbara DeSantis, 323-782-3854
POSESAS de LA HABANA
A Novel by Teresa Dovalpage
“The country doctor gasps for air and says:
I’m about to make a cut in you, so don’t move. And I’m
wringing my hands and wondering if hysterotomy might be like
hysteria, because I’m about to have an attack of it. And then,
poof, my legs go shut on me like the doors of a crowded bus.”
— Posesas de La Habana
Teresa Dovalpage’s novel in Spanish, Posesas
de La Habana (Los Angeles, Pureplay Press, July 2004)
concerns four women in a Cuban family who on a night in the year
2000, during one of Havana’s enforced blackouts, reflect on their
lives and uncover a century of history.
Of her novel, the author says: “When different generations live
under one roof, disputes will surely break out. When four out of
five family members are female, with ages ranging from eleven to
ninety, the estrogen building up in a two-bedroom apartment reaches
dramatic proportions. The characters of Posesas
de La Habana, thanks to endless economic problems and
political asphyxia, live not merely at the edge but in the middle of
a constant nervous breakdown. Can these women find hope on an island
where the sea appears as the only route to salvation?”
Teresa Dovalpage was born in Havana in 1966 and studied
English language and literature at the University of Havana, where
she later served as a professor of English. She came to the United
States in 1996 and taught Spanish at three colleges in San Diego.
Now she lives in Albuquerque and pursues doctoral studies in Latin
American literature at the University of New Mexico. She has just
published a novel in English, A Girl Like Che Guevara (New
York, Soho Press, April 2004).
Prize-winning Cuban-American author Carlos Eire says Dovalpage’s
narrative “lays bare the inner workings
of a society hell-bent on ideological purity, where the real and the
ideal seldom converge, and where love must thrive in the midst of
cruelty and all values need to be inverted for the sake of
survival.”
—Carlos Eire, Professor of History and Religious
Studies at Yale University,
winner of the 2003 National Book Award for non-fiction, speaking of A
Girl Like Che Guevara
Posesas de la Habana, by Teresa Dovalpage. A
novel in Spanish. French cover, 208 pages, ISBN 0-9714366-7-3,
$20.00, July 2004
Pureplay Press, a Los
Angeles-based publisher, is dedicated to the rescue of Cuba’s
history and culture from the turbulence of the last half-century.
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Reviews
of A Girl Like Che
"Piquant."
—O, The Oprah Magazine
Teresa
de la Caridad Doval Page