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LUZ: Scatterings
Mother's Day, 1995, where our story picks up again.
Clara is enjoying the best present ever: her infant daughter, Luz, who she loves more than anything in the world. But if motherhood seems to portend brighter times ahead for our heroine, it is only temporary, a cruel illusion—for darker days in Cuba are definitely looming. The story will now weave itself from the last part of the 1990s through that fateful year of 2001. During this time, Clara and her family will alternately struggle and inch forward as Cuba finally starts to emerge from that dreaded Special Period that so defined this era. But all is not in the clear. Both the US and Cuba, still entrenched in their cold war animosities, seem to be entering a more ominous and troubling period when, in 1997, events in Havana loosely presage that day of infamy which the world will come to know as 9/11. These new darker times will best be typified by what happens to Nelson, Clara’s close friend and mentor, in the underground movement trying to subvert the Castro regime. And in book iii: scatterings, it seems that, as one century closes and another one opens, as one millennium ends and another begins, all lives in question will be ever more tossed and scattered about—not softly, but precariously so. Even the relationship between the Creator and the Son of Man is in peril, for he who was chosen to save the world is now monitoring all developments in Cuba very closely and with great suspicion, more convinced than ever that all these troubling events are part of some grand scheme his Father has in mind and which unwittingly involves him, in this, the thrilling conclusion of LUZ and the Troubled Times series.
Clara is enjoying the best present ever: her infant daughter, Luz, who she loves more than anything in the world. But if motherhood seems to portend brighter times ahead for our heroine, it is only temporary, a cruel illusion—for darker days in Cuba are definitely looming. The story will now weave itself from the last part of the 1990s through that fateful year of 2001. During this time, Clara and her family will alternately struggle and inch forward as Cuba finally starts to emerge from that dreaded Special Period that so defined this era. But all is not in the clear. Both the US and Cuba, still entrenched in their cold war animosities, seem to be entering a more ominous and troubling period when, in 1997, events in Havana loosely presage that day of infamy which the world will come to know as 9/11. These new darker times will best be typified by what happens to Nelson, Clara’s close friend and mentor, in the underground movement trying to subvert the Castro regime. And in book iii: scatterings, it seems that, as one century closes and another one opens, as one millennium ends and another begins, all lives in question will be ever more tossed and scattered about—not softly, but precariously so. Even the relationship between the Creator and the Son of Man is in peril, for he who was chosen to save the world is now monitoring all developments in Cuba very closely and with great suspicion, more convinced than ever that all these troubling events are part of some grand scheme his Father has in mind and which unwittingly involves him, in this, the thrilling conclusion of LUZ and the Troubled Times series.
314 pages, Paperback
Published December 29, 2017
About the author
Luis Gonzalez
3 books4 followersI love writing. I love storytelling. I love creating characters and getting to know them inside out. I love the process of reworking and refining and polishing prose so that it becomes your particular mark and something that is reflective of your style as a writer.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 9, 2019
The best part about this novel is the descriptions of life lived under the chilling mantle of Cuba's socialist dictatorship. How the secret police, the neighborhood 'minders' and the government officials all work to stifle the lives and ambitions and imaginations of people wanting to be free. Where a mother has to choose between being a dissident and her baby; where a husband has to board a rickety raft to sail the shark-infested waters to find something - anything - interesting to do with his life. Where the gaunt, macabre specter of Fidel haunts the living rooms and the classrooms and the restaurants of a nation that cannot be free of that ridiculous old man. Where government bureaucrats count numbers of tables in makeshift "restaurants" to make sure they are compliant while beautiful old Havana disintegrates a little more each day into the tropical storms and suns of an island that used to be free. That was what was good about this book - to live the sounds and the smells of dictatorship - to think how people living under the chilling mantle of arbitrary power feel, and see how they make decisions. For those of us born free, we are not accustomed to this way of living; and that is wonderful. But we should know that it exists, lest we forget and become lazy and lose our freedoms to those who would sell us secret gardens behind the locks and keys of the minders.
February 14, 2018
Love, love, love this novel. It's even better than Luz I and II. Luis Gonzalez is such a poetic writer and in this novel his prose really shines. This is not a book to rush through, it's meant to be devoured slowly. It made me want to go back to Cuba, because he makes La Havana so alive, I wonder what else I missed when I was there. I can't wait to read the next Luz book. I'm curious what the daughter of God is going to be like when she grows up.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews