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Adios, Happy Homeland
In this follow-up to her beloved, prize-winning debut, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Ana Menéndez delivers a liberating, magical, and modern take on the idea of migration and flight.
Adios, Happy Homeland! is a wildly innovative collection of interlinked tales that challenge our preconceptions of storytelling. This critical look at the life of the Cuban writer pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture, blending illusion with reality and exploring themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape—from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self. We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish.
With Adios Happy Homeland! , Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement. Smart, accessible, and literary, it is a captivating portrayal of how stories are translated, (mis)interpreted, and shaped across time and traditions.
Adios, Happy Homeland! is a wildly innovative collection of interlinked tales that challenge our preconceptions of storytelling. This critical look at the life of the Cuban writer pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture, blending illusion with reality and exploring themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape—from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self. We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish.
With Adios Happy Homeland! , Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement. Smart, accessible, and literary, it is a captivating portrayal of how stories are translated, (mis)interpreted, and shaped across time and traditions.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
208 pages, Paperback
First published August 2, 2011
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185 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 7, 2017
Dreams from Exile
Ostensibly, the book is collection of work by Cuban poets gathered by an Irish expatriate who came to the island as a child. All the authors, of course, are fictional, but the fiction provides a framework for the book's extraordinary range. And no matter what voice she chooses, Menéndez can write. Here, from the beginning of the book, is a six-year-old boy woken by his mother to set out on a long trip: "Children are the slaves of other voices. They have not yet mastered the first person singular and are always at the blunt end of someone else's dream." This story, "Cojimar," and the two that follow are obviously based on the 1999 story of Elián González, the sole survivor of an escape by sea from Cuba, who was eventually repatriated by the US authorities. But Menéndez shies from telling the story straight: the first tale is suspended somewhere between the uncomprehending wonder of the child and the almost mystical fears of an old fisherman. The second is a comedy set in an officeful of Miami expatriates engaged in milking the US Government. The third is a Cuban press-release.
This technique of approaching a subject from different angles and in wildly differing styles is central to the author's method. Few of the other pieces can be tied down so clearly to an historical event. She has mostly chosen to occupy the mind of the exile as a psychic space, dreaming alternately of escape and return. Images of transport abound: flight, wings, parachutes, balloons; boats, winds, and the call of the sea; grand railroad terminals, and trains speeding through darkness that never reach their destination. The images collide in the ending to the first story, a surreal nightmare of an old man hunted by killers in a station whose roof opens to the firmament: "With a great concussion of air, the train swept into the station, bearing with it the smell of the sea." Another old person a couple of stories later unspools her dying life to the moment of her birth in a pristine Cuba: "Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time's shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey's return."
Menéndez' evocative surrealism is so quotable, but her style keeps changing. Some of her most effective stories are quite realistic and barely connected to the Cuban theme at all. In "Three Betrayals," an ordinary divorce case becomes an allegory of loss. In "The Express," a professor commuting home from another city starts to reevaluate her life when the train hits a suicide: "And now? Now she was whole, complete, content. She breathed and loved. She'd banished danger; but never again would she be invited to dance on its electric rim." Ana Menéndez certainly knows the electric rim, but she writes from a center of completeness. Despite her verbal wizardry—in Spanish as well as English, using the very act of translation as another metaphor—what I keep coming back to are the deeply-rooted passages that touch me again with their beauty, wonder, or sorrow. Reading this is an experience like no other.
Do we still know what it's like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgetting?There is the generation of Cubans who have made the dangerous trip across the straits, who have settled, even prospered, in Miami, but who still dream of that scented island across the sea. Then there are the later generations, of whom Ana Menéndez is one, raised in one language but living in the world of another, where the place-specific losses of parents and grandparents become metaphors for the losses, dreams, and quest for identity that shape us all. And that is what she does in this extraordinary book, dealing in metaphors of remarkable potency, in a miscellaneous collection of stories, poems, nightmares, and quirky fragments that, so far from breaking apart, resonate together in a vast echo chamber of sorrow, joy, and possibility.
Ostensibly, the book is collection of work by Cuban poets gathered by an Irish expatriate who came to the island as a child. All the authors, of course, are fictional, but the fiction provides a framework for the book's extraordinary range. And no matter what voice she chooses, Menéndez can write. Here, from the beginning of the book, is a six-year-old boy woken by his mother to set out on a long trip: "Children are the slaves of other voices. They have not yet mastered the first person singular and are always at the blunt end of someone else's dream." This story, "Cojimar," and the two that follow are obviously based on the 1999 story of Elián González, the sole survivor of an escape by sea from Cuba, who was eventually repatriated by the US authorities. But Menéndez shies from telling the story straight: the first tale is suspended somewhere between the uncomprehending wonder of the child and the almost mystical fears of an old fisherman. The second is a comedy set in an officeful of Miami expatriates engaged in milking the US Government. The third is a Cuban press-release.
This technique of approaching a subject from different angles and in wildly differing styles is central to the author's method. Few of the other pieces can be tied down so clearly to an historical event. She has mostly chosen to occupy the mind of the exile as a psychic space, dreaming alternately of escape and return. Images of transport abound: flight, wings, parachutes, balloons; boats, winds, and the call of the sea; grand railroad terminals, and trains speeding through darkness that never reach their destination. The images collide in the ending to the first story, a surreal nightmare of an old man hunted by killers in a station whose roof opens to the firmament: "With a great concussion of air, the train swept into the station, bearing with it the smell of the sea." Another old person a couple of stories later unspools her dying life to the moment of her birth in a pristine Cuba: "Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time's shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey's return."
Menéndez' evocative surrealism is so quotable, but her style keeps changing. Some of her most effective stories are quite realistic and barely connected to the Cuban theme at all. In "Three Betrayals," an ordinary divorce case becomes an allegory of loss. In "The Express," a professor commuting home from another city starts to reevaluate her life when the train hits a suicide: "And now? Now she was whole, complete, content. She breathed and loved. She'd banished danger; but never again would she be invited to dance on its electric rim." Ana Menéndez certainly knows the electric rim, but she writes from a center of completeness. Despite her verbal wizardry—in Spanish as well as English, using the very act of translation as another metaphor—what I keep coming back to are the deeply-rooted passages that touch me again with their beauty, wonder, or sorrow. Reading this is an experience like no other.
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May 3, 2012The Cuban-American-Dutch author turns in a dreamy sketchbook that plays with concepts of identity and escape, including escaping comprehension. Protagonists by turns turns rebel or are estranged; historical legends alternate with tall tales. The Elián González affair is imagined from the boy's perspective, then as processed by an Astroturf human-rights group on a self-help binge. A set of fractured English translations precede a story in Berlitz Spanish. Characters float or fly in and out of the narratives, or present down-to-earth advice on flight as an exercise regimen. It's all a wild stretch of imagination, and maybe just a bit out of reach.
April 12, 2021
I like "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd" more. This book still has value because I think that Ana Menendez is trying to exemplify a Cuban national identity through the content, but still, I couldn't really get into this one.
March 20, 2022
"Ella sabe mucho de mucho."
Throughout the book Menéndez's charming humor ties the seemingly unconnected short stories, poems and bios together into a weave of surreal macramé. I cannot say much about this brilliant "anthology" without revealing what must be kept hidden. Nitza Pol-Villa was a great cook, too.
Throughout the book Menéndez's charming humor ties the seemingly unconnected short stories, poems and bios together into a weave of surreal macramé. I cannot say much about this brilliant "anthology" without revealing what must be kept hidden. Nitza Pol-Villa was a great cook, too.
September 11, 2025
An interesting format, but I would have preferred a more cohesive story. Some short stories were more interesting than others, and some had an unclear relevance in my mind. However, I know that the purpose of the book was not to be a singular, linear story so it might just be an issue of personal preference for me.
February 16, 2017
Absurd. Imaginative. Also with interesting perspectives on migration.
January 7, 2018
Too ethereal and heady for my taste.
February 21, 2018
Really cool, innovative. Made me think. Some stories genuinely moved me to tears. 8/10
March 6, 2019
What a strange and wonderful read!
September 23, 2021
Some of the stories are very Italo Calvino. And that's a good thing. I guess.
August 2, 2022
Feels like a giant fever dream. Overall quite interesting.
May 13, 2024
plus des livres avec des formats un peu bizzare s'il veut plait
July 12, 2013
"Dr. Mr. Quain:
It has come to our attention that you intend to publish an anthology of our work. While we are flattered to be remembered (so many of us worked in obscurity for so long), we must nevertheless ask you to abandon your project."
This collection of lyrical short stories is an anthology of short stories by a fictional group of Cuban authors compiled by a fictional Irish editor. The work contains a letter of protest from the poets who object both to being anthologized by a non-Cuban and by being grouped together as Cuban writers and an rebuttal from the editor (who promises to include their protest in his work).
Many of the stories are exquisite and the book overall is lyrical and imaginative. The primary themes include the nature of story-telling, escape, migration, and memory.
I can't wait to teach it in a class on migration narratives.
It has come to our attention that you intend to publish an anthology of our work. While we are flattered to be remembered (so many of us worked in obscurity for so long), we must nevertheless ask you to abandon your project."
This collection of lyrical short stories is an anthology of short stories by a fictional group of Cuban authors compiled by a fictional Irish editor. The work contains a letter of protest from the poets who object both to being anthologized by a non-Cuban and by being grouped together as Cuban writers and an rebuttal from the editor (who promises to include their protest in his work).
Many of the stories are exquisite and the book overall is lyrical and imaginative. The primary themes include the nature of story-telling, escape, migration, and memory.
I can't wait to teach it in a class on migration narratives.
October 26, 2020
Quotes
"I'm well aware that by a certain age, each man and woman has arrived at a handful of truths that they then begin to constrain their lives by."
"What happens? When do we lose that beautiful recklessness?"
-In Defense of Flying
"I'm well aware that by a certain age, each man and woman has arrived at a handful of truths that they then begin to constrain their lives by."
"What happens? When do we lose that beautiful recklessness?"
-In Defense of Flying
June 23, 2015
The magic is in the connections. The magic is in what is lost in translation.
November 15, 2014
so freaking cool. i dont even know how to review this. but SO AWESOME.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews