The Halfway House

Начало книги

It’s not difficult to see a parallel between the life Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales (Havana, 1946-Miami, 1993) led in the United States as an outsider to the American experience and the imagined existence of his alter ego William Figueras in a halfway house or “Boarding Home” as those came to be known in Miami. Rosales, a lifelong misfit who was diagnosed early on with severe schizophrenia, went into exile in 1979 with a history of mental illness. It wasn’t long before he descended to the only spot available to him, “one of those marginal refuges where the desperate and hopeless go.”

The time he spent in several of these institutions provided Rosales with the material to write the novel you have in your hands. The work itself, its powerful condemnation of the Dantean existence of the wards’ miserable existence under the complicit watch of deceitful managers, must be read in the light of his experiences. Rosales wished to unveil the existence of these infernos, writing about the many halfway houses allowed to operate so cruelly thanks to the indifference of a community focused on achieving the American dream, of refugees from Castro’s regime who may have continued to ponder their painful expulsion from Cuba but were determined to get ahead at all costs.

Читать дальше →