Leapfrog

by Guillermo Rosales, Anna Kushner (Translator)

Leapfrog depicts one summer in the life of a very poor young boy in post-revolutionary Havana in the late 50s. He has superhero fantasies, hangs around with the neighborhood kids, smokes cigarettes, tells very lame jokes: By the way, do you know who died? No. Someone who was alive. Laughter. The kids fight, discuss the mysteries of religion and sex, and play games such as leapfrog. So vivid and so very credible, Leapfrog reads as if Rosales had simply transcribed everything that he d heard or said for this one moving and touching book about a lost childhood.

Leapfrog was a finalist for Cuba s prestigious Casa de las Americas award in 1968. Years later, Rosales s sister told The Miami Herald that Rosales felt he hadn t won the prize because his book lacked sufficient leftist fervor, and that subtle critiques of cruel children and hypocritical adults throughout the playful recollections had clearly rankled state officials. In the end the novel never appeared in Cuba. It was first published in Spain in 1994, a year after Rosales s death.

"

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Rosales was a Cuban novelist. A double exile, writing in reaction both to Cuba's totalitarian regime and to the indifference of Cuban-American exiles bent on achieving the American Dream, Rosales created some of the best Cuban literature of the second half of the twentieth century.

Born in Havana, Rosales was a lifelong misfit diagnosed with schizophrenia. A journalist and writer while still in Cuba, he had an early brush with fame when his novel El Juego de la Viola, was a finalist in the reputable "Casa de las Americas" contest. But in 1979 he fled Castro's regime and went into exile in Miami, where he disappeared from public view. He ended up in halfway houses, "those marginal refuges where the desperate and hopeless go." The time he spent there provided the author with the material to write his most famous and viscerally haunting novella, Boarding Home (known in English as The Halfway House). He was the winner of the prestigious 1987 "Letras de Oros" (Golden Letters) contest, judged by the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Rosales committed suicide in Miami in 1993, at the age of 47. Before doing so, he destroyed most of his work. Two novels survived: El Juego de la Viola (1967) and Boarding Home (1987).

Boarding Home was translated into English by Anna Kushner as The Halfway House and published by New Directions in 2009, featuring a preface by Jose Manuel Prieto. It has been hailed for its precise, lapidary style and its uncompromising treatment of personal responsibility for totalitarian rule. Publishers Weekly praised it as a "frightening, nihilistic cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

El Juego de la Viola is forthcoming from New Directions under the title Leapfrog.

Reviews

[alex valdes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leapfrog, the novella, was extremely not my thing. The Magic Still, the collection of short stories that follows, was so extremely, so crucially my thing, it made the novella worth suffering through

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

the second work, after the halfway house, to be appear in english translation from guillermo rosales, leapfrog and other stories (el juego de la viola), along with the former title, represents the sum total of the cuban exile's surviving fiction. prior to his suicide in 1993, rosales destroyed all of his writings save for these two extant titles. after fleeing his caribbean homeland in 1979 to escape castro's regime, rosales immigrated to miami, florida and spent many of his remaining years in psychiatric wards battling schizophrenia. little is apparently known about rosales (save whatever may be gleaned from his semi-autobiographical novel, the halfway house), but he was once a very promising journalist and author.

leapfrog brought attention to the young cuban writer in 1967 (at the age of 21) when it was a finalist for the prestigious casa de las americas award. set in the summer of 1957, rosales's novel(la) captures the antics and imaginative fancies of a young cuban boy and his friends. while leapfrog has some fantastic moments, it tends to read a little disjointedly - upsetting the work's natural rhythm and continuity. accompanying leapfrog are five short stories collected as the magic still, the most notable of which is "the phantom bunker," the tale of a cultish assassination attempt.

the neighbors were sleeping at santa fe beach. television sets, radios, and pressure cookers had cooled off on kitchen tiles. manuel castillo, the night watchman, gave a lazy yawn on one of the park benches and then let his gaze fall over the dimmed houses. in one of them a boy was dreaming of monsters from outer space; and on the other side of the world, a mongoloid child was masturbating alone amid lotus flowers.

*translated from the spanish by anna kushner (the halfway house and gonçalo tavares's jerusalem)

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost done with Leapfrog. Cuban coming of age. Switching point of view even though it is the same narrator throughout. Starts out very charming, very boyish. But devolves into very pained story about the isolation even within a gang that children feel growing up. Death, violence, sex through the eyes of a young boy who knows nothing about any of it.

I felt empathy for the boy and a sort of fascination about the environment (having cuban roots myself).

I'll be finishing it up this weekend.

Finished.

The novella opening this collection is uneven but I think if Rosales had an editor when living who could have convinced him to condense it, it would have made for a wonder short story.

The short stories that comprise the second half of this publication are wonderful. It makes me truly sad that we almost all of this man's work to the flames.

[Arlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

A couple of very good stories in the back of the book were not enough to salvage the collection.