Alguien tiene que llorar otra vez (Somebody Has to Cry Again)

Someone will soon be in tears again is a collection of eleven stories with a great variety of themes and styles. Most are set in Cuba over the last thirty years except for “Taxi driver, or two women”, set in Barcelona, and “Florence ten years later”, set in Florence. Narrators are female; sometimes the voice of the narrator blurs into the author’s. The Cuban stories are drenched in the physicality of a city populated by larger than life characters, chancers and their women seen ironically via a realism that pledges not to be socialist or dirty. Some are more metaliterary, enter Menard or Peter Handke territory. It is an original collection that won the first Guantanamera Narrative Prize.

Marilyn Bobes confesses her devotion to Borges as literary characters, hypertexts and details from her own life intertwine, always in a humorous, ironic vein: it’s a conscious imitation and tribute to the blind Argentinian but one that is thoroughly Cubanised.

This is an original mix of metafiction and more conventional short fiction. Bobes amuses, provokes, but never moralises, driven by the tensions and contradictions in Cuban society and literature.

I think that this collection brings together the best of Bobes, a well-known figure on the Cuban literary scene, in a critical portrait of her society and, in particular, the way it treats women. It can be grotesque, rhapsodic and ironic and should be translated. There is a vogue for Cuban literature in translation and this is a voice that should be there for those readers.

From the reader´s report by Peter Bush