About the Book
Maribel Feliú Gómez is a prestigious Cuban narrator. The title Obscene dialect, where the variety and quality will surprise readers. Often the stories address the world of children, delving into the subconscious of little girls who are recounting the adverse environment that surrounds them, delving into the psychology of the characters and their inner world. Handled with amazing mastery, full of tension or suspense. Other times loaded with eroticism or terror, these stories seduce us in a definitive way.
In this book Obscene Dialect stories all of them we find that singular narrative force that placed her in a well-deserved position among the most outstanding Cuban narrators a long time ago; she with that ability to build atmospheres using both the intimate and the omniscient tone. Beyond the possible classifications, the unfolding into multiple lyrical subjects has marked Feliú's work with an elusive poetic breath that permeates the prose, full of sensuality and extremes. Her characters flirt and oscillate all the time between pleasure and pain, anger and joy, innocence and delirium, loneliness and desire. They can be on the crest of the wave, and the next minute, plunged into the abyss, in a psychological game that the author plays as if she were writing in a trance state, possessed by some magnificent and rapturous deity. The world of these stories is charged with eroticism, but elevated to an almost phantasmagorical level, bordering on the absurd or blurred by an intention capable of unleashing all the demons. In the labyrinth of lights and shadows of this woman's stories, there are many clues that lead us to the very center of who we are. And the keys are here, for whoever wants and knows how to find them. Gasp, meat, is the story with which Maribel Feliú says goodbye to her readers, leaving a deep mark on them, of restlessness and tenderness at the same time. Because whenever we talk about the human being, his fantasies, fears, or imperfections, it will be a reason to celebrate the life that each one possesses. One that the reader will surely find in one of the characters of these stories that the author gives us. When I think of a writer of race, or of another race to paraphrase one of her works, I think of Feliú, for that stark and sincere tone with which she overcomes the blank page, and gives us stories of women who fight to survive loneliness, helplessness, their own demons, or the brute and inhuman force of others. As if the world had become a jungle, and there was no choice but to kill or be killed. Even when the same enemy was our own image, or sometimes, an abominable thing, the father of a girl whom he raped, as occurs in the Red story that opens the volume.We can find daughters who hate their parents; women who yearn for men, but suffer in the end the disappointment of not loving them and of being betrayed; or girls who are mistreated by grandmothers... Childhood is recreated here in a grotesque way; but who does not know of its authenticity. Sex becomes not only a pretext for creation, for this passionate writer, but also a path to liberation, justice, and above all, identity. Different conflicts related to every person, are dealt with and sometimes even resolved through the sexual act, in all its variants, whether as a couple, threesome, or in complete solitude, based on imagination. This is what can be seen in these stories. The style, in Obscene dialect, is evident from the very expression. Those short sentences, and those lyrical images, either because of the dreamlike, or because of the use of metaphor, which give course to the action. The psychology of the characters is also unique, their voices always bordering on the limit, imagination, and fear of destruction; which, however, does not limit them to continue living or to continue dreaming. Something, in other words, like what we would like for ourselves in real life. .
