• Submitted by: Luis Manuel Mazorra
• Culture and Traditions
• 02 / 18 / 2012

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Last Tuesday was presented in the book Havana Travel Miguel Luna, written by Cuban Abel Prieto, also Minister of Culture of the island. The text describes a journey from Pinar del Rio, Havana and to the imaginary Republic Democratic People's Socialist Labor-Agricultural-Pastoral of Mulgavia.

After twelve years of silence extended editorial Abel Prieto Havana readers this "work truly polyphonic and polysemic" as the narrator described Eduardo Heras León during the presentation at the International Book Fair Cuba 2012.

Heras testified to the "remarkable effect" that caused the initial release-from-work this bildungsroman (novel of apprenticeship or training) "lineage rabelaiseana its gargantuan excesses."

The presenter also highlighted the Custom Language "effective" very complex in its simplicity, and how "brilliant" that manages the historical references Prieto, arranged as a backdrop of continuing and humorous adventures of the protagonist.

A novel "memorable" and if we take into account "the gargantuan responsibilities" of the author, "almost a literary miracle," he said.

The essayist and critic Graziella Pogolotti said in turn that this play, set largely in a dystopic Eastern European region in times of decline of "real socialism", proposed in one passage "an allegory about the loss of Utopia. "

Besides being a work "hilarious", which reviews all records of humor (the absurd, satire, irony, parody), it is "an invitation to reflection in this chilling contemporaneity," said the intellectual, who was in Cuba's National Literature Prize 2005.

Travel editor Michael Moon, Rinaldo Acosta explained that the plot runs in parallel times and places-Pinar del Rio, Havana (Cuba) and Mulgavia-so writing alternates two key stylistic aesthetic: the "realist- neocostumbrista "and" satirical speculative. "

 

"Full of inventiveness and chromaticism," this is a piece almost unprecedented in the panorama of Cuban literature, said Acosta, who preferred emparentarla with Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift Irish (1667-1745).

 

This volume also includes 52 drawings by the author, who make a speech complimentary to the linguistic structure of the book.

 

Abel Prieto Jimenez (1950) has published essays, including some studies of José Lezama Lima, Cuban cultural magazines, collections of short stories The bitongos and handsome (1980) and Saturday Night (1989), and the novel The Flight of the cat (1999), which won the Critics Award (2001) on the island.

 

He was president of the Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and since 1997 has served as culture minister in his country.