The Halfway House

by Guillermo Rosales

A posthumously published novella about mental illness written by a mentally ill Cuban exile who committed suicide in middle-age after destroying most of his unpublished work. I read it in a couple of hours, not bad but not great, I might not have read the whole thing if it had been longer.

I seem to have a love-it-or-leave-it thing with Latin American literature. I really like what I've read by García Márquez and I've enjoyed a few things by Carlos Fuentes. On the nonfiction/memoir side, there's the fantastic Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas (also Cuban), which was so good I bought a copy for a friend. (The movie is quite good, too.) But I've had a couple of duds recently. ¡Qué lástima!