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Reading Abilio Estevez's Thine Is the Kingdom is similar to participating in a cocktail get together blindfolded: a million interactions are all happening at exactly the same time and you have to work to figure out just who's chatting. But this amazing novel out of Cuba is worth the extra effort. Set in a run-down enclave of pre-Castro Havana known as the Island, the storyplot employs the fortunes of its residents via a marvelous realist dreamscape of illusion, history, life, fatality, love, and the weather. There is the crazy Barefoot Countess; the pastry merchant, Merengue; and the bookstore owner Rolo. There may be Neglect Berta who lives with her always sleeping 90-year-old mom, Dona Juana, and Irene who lives with her not-yet-out-of-the-closet gay son, Lucio. Professor Kingston, the Jamaican English educator; Casta Diva, a would-be opera singer; Chavito, the carver of poor imitations of classical statues; Vido, the adolescent voyeur; Mercedes and her blind sister Marta who dreams of Florence--the cast is enormous and cacophonous. The reserve hopscotches among people, tenses, first-, second-, and third-person narratives--often within the same paragraph--as Estevez plunges us headlong in to the internal thoughts, dreams, and doubts of his multitude of dramatis personae. On this page it is advisable to use the future tense, a generally inadvisable practice. It was already written that Chacho experienced gotten back again from Head office just past four in the evening, and that he was the first ever to notice the approaching storm.... The next day, after the events that will be narrated had occurred, Chacho will commence to talk less, and less, and less, until he makes a decision to take to foundation.... And, as it is best not to misuse this generally inadvisable tense, it is just and proper that we leave Chacho to his silence until such a time as he should reappear, as God wills it, in this narration. In less attained hands this hodgepodge of voices, narrative threads, and personalities may have added up to literary bedlam. But there is method in Estevez's madness as the storyplot gradually emerges; in the meantime the sheer power of his prose and sly commentary by himself inventions take the reader through this great debut by one of Cuba's best and brightest new voices.
