París Era Una Rumba

Hemingway's Paris was a party... and Zoé Valdés's was a rumba. Numerous famous figures from the literary and artistic world of the 1980s--Julio Cortázar, Samuel Beckett, Alberto Moravia, Cioran, Dora Maar...-- come together in this lively, disturbing, and revealing book, where episodes of all kinds unfold, such as the one dedicated to the street of porn theaters in Paris, where the author ventured not to see the films being shown, but to observe the men in their raincoats and office suits. The human tableau contained in these pages shows an indelible era of Parisian city life and of the Europe that was and will always be, thanks to Valdés's enormous literary talent. "In Havana I was very Parisian, in Paris I am very Havana. Nothing has changed. But I have revered Havana for several decades from the distance offered by place and time. Not because I don't want to return, but because my thoughts and my creative freedom prevent the authorities of my country from authorizing my return to the land where I was born. I'm not complaining, it could have been worse... And yet here I am. Alive. Although that's not exactly the subject of the story. Here I am, yes, still alive, still in Paris, where I arrived in 1983, about to turn twenty-three, by a stroke of luck, rather than "concurrente azar" (concurring chance), as the great poet and novelist José Lezama Lima would say. The subject of this story is, as it deserves to be, the freedom I learned in a city that taught me everything about that beautiful and vital word. Paris, the city of sublime temptations... The true human and artistic meaning of the word freedom, then and now...". Z. V. "In the pages of 'Paris was a Rumba', Zoé Valdés talks about the French capital she discovered in 1983, when she was only 23 years old. She talks about the freedom the city taught her and the sublime temptations she faced. This book tells the story of a woman from Havana who became a Parisian." Albert Bensoussan "The Madonna of Cuban literature. Zoé Valdés is our Anaïs Nin." Larry Rohter, NEW YORK TIMES