PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThough her novel is largely allegorical, Sainz Borgo avoids a narrative that is overly reduced by symbols; the writing, like Coetzee’s, is tense and complex. In her hands, Borges’s question of bravery — and its obverse, cowardice — isn’t a neon theme, but rather a dynamic system made up of choices ... Borges once told his translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni to write not what he said, but what he was trying to say. Throughout It Would Be Night in Caracas, there are places where its translator, Elizabeth Bryer, does neither ... Near the end, Adelaida returns to her mother’s grave. Embossed letters have been stolen from the gravestone, the name she shared with her mother gone: \'For losing, we even lost our name. The Falcóns, queens of a world that was in its death throes.\' Sainz Borgo stretches for, but doesn’t quite reach, a response to Vásquez. Though in that mysterious meaning-making machine that is a novel, she accidentally finds a better way to ask the question: After we bury our dead, are we ever the same?
Wendy Guerra Trans. by Achy Obejas
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"... Guerra plays with the expectation one might have of an authoritative account of the island during the normalizing of United States-Cuba relations. As often as [Guerra] gives a concrete description of Havana in the loosening grip of socialism, she gives one that dances and evades ... Though the phrasing \'guayabera shirt\' makes this Spanish speaker flinch, [the translator] succeeds in capturing the sense of doom, the weather of half-truths and paranoia, floating at the edges of Cleo’s Cuba.\
