A Handbook to Luck

Zusatztext “Graceful. . . . Beautiful. . . . Provocative.”— USA Today “Garcia writes with humor! tenderness and an intuitive sense of how ordinary people weather fortune's turns. If you long for a 'handbook' that reveals how ordinary people become extraordinary! you are in luck.”— New York Daily News “A magically lyrical meditation on life and human dreams . . . García [is] a poet of imagery and metaphor.” — Elle “Pitch-perfect . . .. García is still drawn to describe the richness and variety of the immigrant experience. . . . [But] she also fixes her attention on the fundamentally human desire to make sense of the world! to impose order on the chaos of nature and to rationalize one's mysterious place within it.” — Chicago Tribune Informationen zum Autor Cristina Garcia was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban , was nominated for a National Book Award and had been widely translated. Ms. Garcia has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. She lives in Santa Monica with her daughter, Pilar. Klappentext In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel by beloved storyteller Cristina García. Leseprobe Enrique Florit Enrique Florit climbed the stairs to the roof of his apartment building, which was eye level with the top of the street's jacaranda trees. It had rained that afternoon and dark puddles stained the cement and the peeling tar paper. When Enrique opened the doors of the wire-mesh cages, the doves fluttered to his shoulders and outstretched arms. Five months ago, he and his father had bought the doves and dyed their feathers a rainbow of pastels. Now Enrique poured their daily seed, freshened their water, listened to the low blue murmurings in their throats.His father had introduced the doves into his act on New Year's Eve. He performed every other weekend at a cocktail lounge in Marina del Rey and needed the doves to compete with the top-billed magician's unicycle-riding parrot. Papi tried to upstage the parrot by having his doves ride a battery-operated motorcycle across a tiny tightrope. Enrique attended the New Year's Eve show. The doves performed unpredictably, sometimes riding on cue, sometimes cooing indifferently from the rim of his father's top hat. A couple flew out of the room altogether.Yet each time Papi strode across the stage in his tuxedo and plum-colored velvet cape, Enrique's heart rose an inch in his chest. He overheard a woman with teased-up hair say to her table companions: Ooooh, he looks just like that Ricky Ricardo! In California, nobody heard much about Cuba except for Ricky Ricardo, the hijackings to Havana, and, of course, El Comandante himself.Enrique coaxed the doves back into their cages one by one. The sunset reddened the hovering dust. A propeller plane took off from the airport to the south. It puttered high over the ocean before turning toward land. During their first months in Los Angeles, Papi had kept a suitcase packed in case they needed to return to Cuba in a hurry. He listened to the Spanish-language radio stations and played boleros every night before bed. He read El Diario for any news of El Comandante's fall and kept their clocks three hours ahead, on Havana time. After a while they grew ac...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Cristina Garcia, Cristina García
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 08.04.2008
• EAN: 9780307276803
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27680-3
• Pagine: 272
• Dimensioni: 133 mm x 202 mm x 17 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi > Fiabe, saghe, leggende