FALL SPOTLIGHT: ERNESTO MESTRE-REED

Bella Andrea

Set in 1990s Cuba, Ernesto Mestre-Reed’s new novel, Sacrificio (Soho, Sept. 6), explores the impact of political uncertainty and the AIDS crisis on that country and its people to great effect. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus calls the book a “compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.” Mestre-Reed answered our questions by email.

What inspired you to write this book, and why now? How long did you spend working on it? I wanted to write this story for several reasons. One is I wanted to complete a trilogy about my birth country dealing with its queer community directly during one of its most troubled periods. Cuba was the only country in the world that quarantined its HIV-positive patients in sanitariums, which led to worldwide condemnation and was part of a long list of events in which it became obvious that the socialist experiment had begun to crumble. Rafa, the young protagonist, is a guajiro from the more rural eastern part of the country where I was born, and he comes of age hard in the capital during a dangerous period of scarcity and violence. Through many revisions and advice from an amazing group of close readers—I worked on the book for long over a decade—I was able to bring together a narrative that, while it is very particular about the tumult in Havana during this period, I hope…resonates with how we are all—no matter in what society we live in—forever entangled in that search for an ideal of personal liberty that is too often just out of reach. Is there a book you’ve read that made you think to yourself, I wish I had written that? What was it, and why? A classic I wish I had written and that I have read and taught dozens of times is Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, an almost impossibly perfect novel written by a very imperfect man. I first read it right after high school and could barely understand it— or I should say the first couple of times I tried to read it I couldn’t get past Quentin’s visit to the magnificently bitter Rosa Coldfield. The fire of that prose burned me because it made me want to just dive into it, both be consumed by it and learn how to ignite my own prose like that someday. In the many subsequent readings, it has taught me more about the art of storytelling, the power of how narrative is controlled and surrendered, than any other novel. It is also unflinching and brutally candid in its confrontation with our troubled history, something I try hard to emulate. Similarly, a contemporary work like Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman, Faulkner-ian in its dominating