The Cuban-American-Dutch author turns in a dreamy sketchbook that plays with concepts of identity and escape, including escaping comprehension. Protagonists by turns turns rebel or are estranged; historical legends alternate with tall tales. The Elián González affair is imagined from the boy's perspective, then as processed by an Astroturf human-rights group on a self-help binge. A set of fractured English translations precede a story in Berlitz Spanish. Characters float or fly in and out of the narratives, or present down-to-earth advice on flight as an exercise regimen. It's all a wild stretch of imagination, and maybe just a bit out of reach.

I don't know why there are so few copies of Adios, Happy Homeland! on LibraryThing at the moment, and thus why it isn't better known. It is fantastic.

It caught me off guard because it very much uses the Literary Agent Hypothesis (warning: TVTropes link), which is one of my favorite things in fiction. The book is formatted like an anthology of short stories, including author bios in the back, which is the part that tricked me, until I started reading. All the stories are interconnected in some way, and they all share a theme of "flight" (both the literal flying definition and the escape connotation). There is a lot of imagery of trains, balloons, swimming, holes-in-the-sky-to-the-stars, and as related images, wind and the stars.

Ana Menéndez is a Cuban-American author from California. The stories all have a Cuban perspective, which is why I'd originally picked the book up (I wanted to read literature from a place I'd never done before, particularly places in the Caribbean or South America). Some stories take place in Cuba, others in Miami or no-place-in-particular. One story is written in Spanish, though a link is included for an English translation on Menéndez's website.

The book is very modern, with lots of plays on language and meaning...I guess it's postmodern, too? But I mean modern in that it explicitly references the Internet and even has a footnote to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stowaway). I think one of the stories is about the Elian Gonzalez custody battle back in the '90s, but I'm not positive that it isn't about a similar but fictional child. That's one of the things about the stories and the way they play with reality and the meaning of things - it's magical realism, I suppose, and a fictionalization or warping of actual things. There's math in one of the stories, and poetry, and folk meteorology...

At first, once I realized that Adios, Happy Homeland! uses the literary agent hypothesis, I wasn't sure if it wasn't a little amateurish and clumsy because of how obvious some of the themes are. But I think it is a great piece of literary fiction and not so amateur at all - the more I consider it and talk about it, the more I realize how carefully and intricately it is crafted, and those obvious themes are just on the surface.

If anything, the story that follows a woman's life backwards as she succumbs to Alzheimer's and remembers her life in reverse is great. I've never read anything quite like it before, though the premise seems kind of obvious. The Spanish-language chapter I referred to above was particularly amusing to me once I read the translation - it's all about translation and reading in another language.

I truly loved Adios, Happy Homeland! and the experience of reading it. I am so happy that I browsed the library stacks one day and took a chance on it - and I hope that more people will do the same. ( )

How does one escape? From what one does one need to escape? Why? Ana Menéndez's new collection of interlinked tales is all about escape artists, starting with the author herself. Each tale is attributed to a concocted author, for whom Menéndez has supplied an appropriately imaginative biographical note, including one for herself: "Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance."

Adios, Happy Homeland! is a flight of fancy, or rather, a collection of flights of fancy.... more at Belletrista: http://www.belletrista.com/2011/Issue12/reviews_2.php ( )