Author: Elizabeth Mirabal
- Fiction
- Editorial Verbum
- ISBN: 978-8490741160
- Release Date: 10-05-2014
-Reviewed by: James Lyons
La Isla de la Mujeres Tristes is a novel that is inspired by the Cuban poet Juana Borrero, who began writing poems at a young age as if she knew that her time on this earth would be short. It’s a short novel, the first of the young Cuban writer Elizabeth Mirabal, but it is not a quick read due to its continual historical references. In it the author reveals to us the anxieties and tragedies of the Borrero family, in the midst of the drama of war that Cuba was facing at the end of the 19th century.
At the father’s initiative, Juana, her sisters and even their little brother Estebita were raised in an environment of literature and art that included frequent visits by poets and writers. An image of a privileged education was presented in which the children were treated like small adults and in which “There were no toys, just easels, brushes and books.” Sadly, the father, who tried to foster love for art and literature in his daughters was not capable of giving them the freedom to develop their own identities.
The variety of styles with which the author writes makes this novel even more interesting. In the novel she invites us to figure out who’s who in this story, as well as their secrets (el Antínoo). The atmosphere of sadness is a constant. The war, failed romances, the directions taken by their lives, the painful and bitter memories of the surviving sisters, of what their lives were like and how they were marked by sadness until the end of their days; the controlling and obsessive personality of their good-hearted father, suffering from unresolved internal conflicts (The Borreros were raised locked both physically and mentally in a room-cell), and madness which was revealed after Juana’s death. “Everyone there ends up going crazy…” one of the characters affirms.
Nevertheless, Mirabal is able to infuse the narrative with Caribbean humor in the midst of so much sadness and fatalism, such as when she writes “Cuba, indignant with Europe for having filled the Island with mice, decided to take revenge by sending back a shipment of cockroaches,” to which someone asks in jest whether Cuba received payment for that shipment.
In some passages in La Isla de las Mujeres Tristes, you feel like you are reading one of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, in which the themes of insomnia, love of the night and death are characteristic, for example: “They were hardly exposed to the sun…” In the story of these sisters there are also some parallels with the Marsh sisters in the Louisa May Alcott novel, “Little Women”. Both novels have a war and tragedy as a background which is present in their lives as well as their incursions into literature.
An unusual aspect of this novel could be the style of humor and wittiness that Mirabal uses, and how she inserts them in the midst of so much drama. Some interesting comparisons are also highlighted: “I watched them take turns at the orange tree like the fading trinity that they forged; the father, the daughter and the Holy Spirit.”
Most of the narration of the facts and dialogues are strong enough to be believable, although the story of the family’s exile abroad is short. This exile is not really felt. There is also a certain void given the lack of more description of Cuba of that era which would give a clearer context to the panorama of the times in which this family was living.
