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• Arts and Culture
• Caribbean
• Destinations
• Education
• history
• Holguín
• Literature
• national
• personalities
• 12 / 22 / 2008

Was presented at the Pedro Ortiz literary culture office in Holguin city, with the author´s attendance and a good deal of people that have been eager to buy one of the most coveted books of Cuba’s literature these last years.

Published by the Letras Cubanas Editing House, the title is distinguished by being a rich narrative piece in which four histories are intertwined: the visions by Gelsomina who is confined into a psychiatric hospital; her mother’s confessions to the

doctor that is assisting her; the adventures of her son -young and unfriendly; and her sister´s letters from Miami.

The peculiar thing relies on the main character, named originally Maria Mercedes Pilar de la Concepcion but made up her mind and called herself Gelsomina in memory to a friend, a suicidal poet that enhanced that name at the Fellini’s way in

sonnets of visceral and aching beauty, in a clear allusion to Raul Hernandez Novas, a key figure in Cuba’s lyrics.

Gelsomina, apart from this, is a heavy reader, in an unrestrainable journey from her reclusion across the most unusual literate horizons, but always in open stance of verbal statements, what allows her to luckily travel through universes that go

from Jose Lezama Lima and Jorge Luis Borges to Julieta Burgos and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Besides this, the work comes to be a mestizo text, with mettles that clearly show fascination for poetry and a beloved mythical vocation, when strolling with charm through the legendary environments of the Caribbean and its memory, from a

frank assimilation of Cervantine impulses that transforms it into an unforgettable reading piece.

The author, Margarita Mateo Palmer, born in Havana, in 1950, is a PhD in Literary Sciences and is a member of the Cuban Language Academy, and therefore, of the Spanish Language Royal Academy. She is one of the most remarkable Cuban

essayists, the quality of her books has been awarded in several contests.

(ACN)