I know what you went through while reading a bunch of self-published books. I spent a year and a half reading and reviewing such books and it's either a hit or miss game, with nothing in between. But even in the worst ones, one could find glimpses of original thoughts. To point them out to the potential readers is something I genuinely enjoyed. Kudos for you for your work.
You are so right— there were some flashes of weirdly wonderful in most of them and some evidence of craft as well. Thank you for commenting. It’s good to know some readers of this newsletter are interested in self-published fiction. How did you get into it?
I write reviews of the books that I read and then an organization approached me with an offer of free books for honest reviews or beta reading. I loved it and made some interesting writer friends on the way, but then slowly it took up my entire reading schedule.
I'm glad CUBAFRUIT is getting so much attention, because it's a really enjoyable read on a page-to-page level (even the lurid violence feels like the right kind of pulpiness! ymmv obviously), and the tripartate structure (rise of Basto / fall of Basto / biographer at gunpoint, all interwoven brilliantly) is fantastic too. My only point of frustration was with the fast-and-looseness of the alternate history here -- took me way too long to figure out, wait, who's the US President in this timeline? Is San Mara literally replacing Cuba in this timeline or is it a related nation?
But yeah, Sorondo has a lot on his mind here about the relationship between politics and the media, even on the meta level -- note the way that so many characters in the book go unnamed for hundreds of pages, until the exact moment they lose their power. (I was struck by the very cagey, very deliberate description of the biographer as "bilingual" -- I'm sure a lot of readers assumed he's a white guy in the Robert Caro mold, but explicitly giving him ANY race or ethnicity would get in the way of his self-proclaimed neutral observer status... very canny on Sorondo's part...)
I agree about the way the book treats bilingualism. I noticed sometimes the same character POV or speech is rendered in what sounds like the English of.a Spanish speaker, and then at other times they use Spanish that seemed to have errors in it. I did not quite know what to make of it, because there weren’t enough examples to find a consistent pattern, for me. But it was an intriguing hedge of character identity and something I think only bilingual people might pick up on.
I know what you went through while reading a bunch of self-published books. I spent a year and a half reading and reviewing such books and it's either a hit or miss game, with nothing in between. But even in the worst ones, one could find glimpses of original thoughts. To point them out to the potential readers is something I genuinely enjoyed. Kudos for you for your work.
The book seems really intriguing.
You are so right— there were some flashes of weirdly wonderful in most of them and some evidence of craft as well. Thank you for commenting. It’s good to know some readers of this newsletter are interested in self-published fiction. How did you get into it?
I write reviews of the books that I read and then an organization approached me with an offer of free books for honest reviews or beta reading. I loved it and made some interesting writer friends on the way, but then slowly it took up my entire reading schedule.
I'm glad CUBAFRUIT is getting so much attention, because it's a really enjoyable read on a page-to-page level (even the lurid violence feels like the right kind of pulpiness! ymmv obviously), and the tripartate structure (rise of Basto / fall of Basto / biographer at gunpoint, all interwoven brilliantly) is fantastic too. My only point of frustration was with the fast-and-looseness of the alternate history here -- took me way too long to figure out, wait, who's the US President in this timeline? Is San Mara literally replacing Cuba in this timeline or is it a related nation?
But yeah, Sorondo has a lot on his mind here about the relationship between politics and the media, even on the meta level -- note the way that so many characters in the book go unnamed for hundreds of pages, until the exact moment they lose their power. (I was struck by the very cagey, very deliberate description of the biographer as "bilingual" -- I'm sure a lot of readers assumed he's a white guy in the Robert Caro mold, but explicitly giving him ANY race or ethnicity would get in the way of his self-proclaimed neutral observer status... very canny on Sorondo's part...)
I agree about the way the book treats bilingualism. I noticed sometimes the same character POV or speech is rendered in what sounds like the English of.a Spanish speaker, and then at other times they use Spanish that seemed to have errors in it. I did not quite know what to make of it, because there weren’t enough examples to find a consistent pattern, for me. But it was an intriguing hedge of character identity and something I think only bilingual people might pick up on.