Revolution Sunday is a complicated book, and a challenging one. It mixes poetry and prose, autofiction and hyperrealism, intense sensory detail and complete logistical vagueness. It has a plot, but not one that provides much momentum, or even meaning ... Achy Obejas does an exceptional job translating Revolution Sunday, especially as the novel turns inward. Her English prose is as intense and reckless as Cleo's Havana. In a less confident translator's hands, Cleo would lie flat on the page. Thanks to Obejas, she shimmers with life ... Revolutionary Sunday is a dirty novel, full of corruption, deception and betrayal. Guerra is a fearless writer, and she's lucky to have a fearless translator. Together, they make Revolution Sunday more vivid than life.
... 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.
Lyrical and breathless ... a riveting look into the lives of artists attempting free expression in censored regimes. The story ends with the inclusion of Cleo’s weaponized poems, beautiful, heartbreaking testaments to her dissent.
What could be a restive, paranoid novel about the effects of Cuban state surveillanceis marred by a need for exaggerated poeticism at all costs, including coherence. Revolution Sunday should be exciting: There are gunshots and glamorous parties, spies and traitors, kidnappings and affairs. At one point, Sting appears at the narrator’s door, clutching an in-flight magazine. But instead the novel feels muted and muddled ... Occasional passages... hint at what this novel would look like if bits of pretty incoherence weren’t clogging the drains. Guerra sometimes succeeds in creating a mood ... Difficult prose has to be earned: There has to be something worthwhile behind it.
Genre-defying ... Achy Obejas’s translation deftly reproduces the searing and ethereal quality of Guerra’s voice, one that is ultimately in pursuit of liberation from the confines of politics and fear. Revolution Sunday transits between alienation and globalization, state surveillance and private rendezvous, Hollywood fantasies, and everyday life—in the process, Guerra writes a world where there is no escape from the potency of her poetics.
The reader barely has a chance to breathe in this riveting, poetic, fever dream of a novel that tackles the unmooring of a character beset by betrayal ... Like the diarist Anaïs Nin, who Guerra admires, the intensely personal is just that, a searing first-person account that is meant to connect one soul directly to another.
With lyrical prose and on-target character development, Guerra tells Cleo’s story with a razor-like touch. This is not an especially large book, but it’s packed with pathos and humanity.
Guerra dips fluidly in and out of stifling scenes in Cleo’s home, extravagant parties in Havana mansions, contrived gatherings on Mexico City terraces, silent walks down the Cannes red carpet, unfiltered conversations in Brooklyn apartments . . . all of which are narrated by an 'I' that becomes less stable as the plot progresses ... Achy Obejas’s translation deftly reproduces the searing and ethereal quality of Guerra’s voice, one that is ultimately in pursuit of liberation from the confines of politics and fear.
Arresting...an explosive portrait of loneliness and isolation. Thick with the atmosphere of Cleo’s Havana on the cusp of the Cuban thaw, the novel reads like the world’s most poetic anxiety dream, vibrant and stifling ... Demanding and unforgettable.
