Contemporary of his compatriot Leonard Padura, the Cuban writer Daina Chaviano He makes his notable literary career a miscellany of genres with shared scenarios about his Cuban roots.
The result is a magical realism in the strict sense of the combination of both terms. Because in the plots of DaÃna Chaviano there is prospecting in the fantastic, the mystery, projections towards new worlds from the parallel sensation of the feet glued to the ground.
Nothing better to bring us all closer to various humanistic or sociological problems than to lead us through the allegorical, with that double and juicy reading that convinces, in its tangential approach, fans of the fantasy genre or science fiction, but which also ends up assaulting the reader's conscience with those questions that remain.
Characters overflowing with that essential empathy around the drives that move us and combinations of stagings between the extraordinary and the common, in need of the imagination of an author who ultimately leaves those grounds of reflection in each chapter until the most unexpected end.
Top 3 best novels by DaÃna Chaviano
Children of the goddess Hurricane
It is not that hurricanes are the exclusive patrimony of Cuba, but it is also true that when one arrives on the island, all of it ends up suffering the consequences. This has happened since ancient times, waiting for current climatic changes to modify, almost certainly for the worse, that sinister fondness of cyclones for the Caribbean.
But the reference to these atmospheric phenomena serves in this novel for an ancestral vision of them. Because the vision of them more than 500 years ago would be linked by the aborigines with divine wills. To those bygone days we travel hand in hand with Alicia Solomon, a particular researcher of antiquity who faces the deciphering of an ancient manuscript that leads her to a frenetic investigation in which her life will be in danger.
Because what the sixteenth century document testifies can have hurricane-like effects on historical foundations and on the most current reality. Alicia's life progresses in parallel, in those planes that equate past and present by the narrators, with the existence of Juana, the writer of the document, an illuminating testimony about the days of the conquest. The connection between both guides us towards the unveiling of the mystery. The dangers that stalked and haunt both are in tune with similar wills to power, with interests to subdue at all costs. Alice will then understand that her mission transcends to a much higher level than mere and significant discovery.
The island of infinite loves
A novel that plays with the warm and melancholic attraction to that past full of intrastories, including those that each one harbors in that word of mouth of family vicissitudes when in the past circumstances were harsh.
Because in the three families that Cecilia is getting to know, as told in a story by an older woman (in the manner of a grandmother who narrates from the mixture of memories and idealization), we enjoy that call of origin, of our origin as reflection of mimetic moments brushed from the tragic. In the meetings in the shelter of friendly Miami, Cecilia travels with her new confidante to Cuba, still a colony of Spain. But from there it jumps to other continents.
From China to Spain and a small place in Africa, where different women face that adversity that make up beautiful stories from resilience. Everything fits into that idea of ​​overcoming or, at least, the attempt to face bad luck as a condemnation of human becoming for the world. In contrast, the intensity of love permeates everything, with that force of the opposite of evil and death, of the necessary extreme balance of what, for the better, is considered essentially human.
The Dinosaur Trough
The most daring of DaÃna Chaviano's stories. One of those stories with a science fiction approach that ends up splashing on much more transcendental aspects in the social sphere.
If at the time Margaret Atwood pulled CiFi staging to tackle feminism starkly in «The Handmaid's Tale«, Here Chaviano also leads us to impossible arguments to refocus from the outside towards the deepest interstices of our social system. For further consideration of the idea, this volume is structured in stories towards very disparate impressions full of surrealism, humor, erotic connotations and criticism disguised as metaphors or illuminating hyperbole.
Only from a distance can the value and transcendence of social values ​​over which double standards, phobias of what is different, and cynicism fly over. Without a doubt, a fragile balance that, exposed to impossible turns, reveals miseries and awakens hilarity as well as reflection.
It impacted me a lot and made it number one in my Hit Parade of writers, when I first read The Worlds I Love and then The Dinosaur Trough. It is fascinating to read your books.