PositiveWorld Literature Today... unlike Guerra’s narrative, Álvarez’s critique of Castrism is not trumpeted in solipsistic fanfare. It is delivered in the mournful rhythm of the bolero ... With The Fallen we are witness to the birth of a new wave of Cuban prose, influenced by the crónica (a hybrid journalistic genre that is at once informative and interpretive), conceived out of his formal training as a journalist, and nurtured by his literary mentors, among whom Capote and Wolfe figure prominently. And Hemingway. In fact, there is much of Hemingway in The Fallen, most of all Hemingway’s restrained prose, \'stripped to its firm young bones, as Dorothy Parker described it ... while Álvarez denies that The Fallen is a political allegory, it is difficult not to read it as one ... I wanted to like this translation very much, partly because I welcome Álvarez’s introduction to an English-speaking audience and partly because I know the reputation of its translator. And while there is much to like about it, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped. While Frank Wynne’s prose is generally fluid, the (apparently) indiscriminate use of negative contraction and noncontraction renders the prose uneven at times. What’s more, his British idiom seems out of place—almost anachronistic—for this text. I say this aware that Wynne is Irish, and that it is absurd to expect that he write in any other idiom. That said, while much of the academic and literary world today is committed to decolonizing literature, the translation’s British idiom, in a way, could be read as a colonizing act ... At best, these foreignizations can cause some degree of cultural dissonance; at worst, they reinforce a mistaken notion that all Latin cultures are the same ... one hopes to see more in translation from this writer.
