PositiveThe New York Review of Books...translated into English with great precision by Frank Wynne ... Although Álvarez’s characters deal with their poverty without wallowing in sorrow, he doesn’t attempt to romanticize them by suggesting that their hardships dignify them ... Álvarez’s prose is terse, which is uncharacteristic of Cuban fiction, and often bleak. He casts a rather cold eye on the parents’ decline and the children’s moral failing...And in a blistering dissection of the revolution’s practice of awarding coveted commodities on the basis of exemplary conduct, the daughter recounts how the prospect of owning a television causes neighbors to attack one another and invent histories of hardship in order to seem more deserving ... [offers] extraordinarily pointed and poignant commentary on one of the twentieth century’s most calamitous social experiments, and on the inheritors of its ruins.
