The Messenger
By Mayra Montero; Edith Grossman
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780060929619, 228pp.)
Publication Date: May 12, 2000
Categories: Historical - General, Literary
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Set in Cuba, The Messenger tells the story of a pair of doomed lovers-world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso and his Chinese-Cuban mullatta mistress. In June 1920 a bomb exploded at the Teatro Nacional in Havana at the very moment that Enrico Caruso was singing RadamÈs in the opera AÏda. In a panic, he fled the theater and disappeared into the streets of Havana. What happened to him is the story imagined by Mayra Montero. As Caruso tries to escape the murderous agents of the Black Hand, he is drawn into a passionate love affair with Aida Cheng, a woman whose godfather is the powerful Afro-Cuban santero JosÉ de CalazÁn. Told by Enriqueta, the daughter born of the love affair, and by Aida herself as she lies dying many years later, The Messenger unfolds its mysteries against the rhythms of African santerÍa and Chinese folk magic and weaves a brooding, compelling tale of love and death.
Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952, but has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a weekly column in El Nuevo Dia newspaper. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards. Each of her subsequent books -- The Last Night I Spent With You, The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm of Darkness, and The Messenger -- has been published in the United States in translations by Edith Grossman, as well as in several European countries. Her other nonfiction work appears frequently in scholarly and literary publications throughout the world.
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