This extraordinarily ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes'
Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumba
describes a country beset by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales told in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's
Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Lazarus Rumba
centers around three generations of woman in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as, almost inadvertently, she becomes the most famous dissident on the island.