Review: "A Greek Love" by Zoé Valdés

A Greek Love by Zoé Valdés, translated by David Frye
Published May 2023 via Arcade
★★★

Havana in the 1970s: There is a rhythm to daily life, and a party (or Party) line to follow. For Zé, though, life promises something else—and so it is at the beginning of the book that she finds herself telling her parents that she is pregnant.

That the father is a Greek sailor is, in Havana, scandalous—it would be one thing for Zé to fall for a Soviet, but a Greek? That's something else entirely. And so Zé is sent away to raise her child in a city with fewer prying eyes, and her life changes course. Zé dreams of a different life, sometimes, but it isn't the one you might expect—she doesn't so much dream of escaping to the West as she imagines a life in Cuba in which her father is less volatile, the father of her child is still in Cuba, and the rooms don't all run the risk of being bugged.

This is probably a 3.5-star read for me—a little too much telling in places, a little too much exposition through dialogue. But I have read precious little about life in Cuba, and even less about life in Cuba in the 70s. Zé's life is not an easy one: her family lives in a tenement, her father is abusive, and because this is the status quo, the people around them turn a blind eye. She knows enough to dream of more, but she is also reluctant to see her family broken up, to lose the connection to her father. I love the ambivalence—she knows that, abroad, she'd have more opportunities and likely live a happier life, but she can also see how much she'd be leaving behind, and what it would mean for the people she loves.

The author's Wikipedia page is fairly fascinating in its own right, and I may have to seek out some more of her work, which apparently often pulls from her own life.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.