Infinite country patricia engel review5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() "Flor's calls didn't cease until I turned the phone off, parking the car at our usual corner on Prado, waiting for my favorite face to emerge from the shadows of the archways. "I was already driving along the seawall, the waves spiking over the Malecón, covering the avenue in liquid sheen," Mago says. While less overtly political than, say, Julianne Pachico's "The Lucky Ones," civil wars haze the horizons of "The Faraway World." Engel plumbs the hypocrisies of church and state, yet also reaffirms a mystical faith, from compassionate priests such as Padre Andrade in "Ramiro," to the penitent Margarita, who accepts an offer from the unhappily partnered Mago to chauffeur her around Havana's basilicas, sparking a romance that may or may not spirit them away. ![]() we were at the base of the old theater's concrete horseshoe, overgrown with plants, even trees, and I thought of my grandmother's old stories about the place, where she'd come to hear her first zarzuela when Havana was still grand and beautiful, before its shredding and abandonment and exodus." ![]() ![]() "We walked past the street thieves, the walls of garbage, and into the theater through a gap that had been ripped through the wooden door blocks. "Campoamor" depicts an impoverished Lothario as he juggles relationships amid the sodden decay of his native Cuba Engel's finely calibrated sentences recall Junot Díaz's Spanglish. These characters limn the chains that bind men and women, colonialism and power. ![]()
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