PORTELA, ENA LUC¡A
Witty and humorously written in colloquial Cuban, One hundred bottles in a wall (2002), anatomy of a double murder, takes place in the '90s Havanna, amidst the crisis provoked by the collapse of the socialist bloc. Zeta -Zee- main character and narrator, who manages to survive by illicit means, recounts her relation with Moises, former judge of the Supreme Court whose story relates to the «crash of a world and the fall of the gods», the collapse of utopia. With Zeta and her friend Linda -a thriller writer- we delve into a marginal underground world, unheard of in touristic guides to Cuba. Translated into English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Italian, Greek and Turkish, this is Ena Lucia Portela's best known novel. Born in 1972 in Havanna, Cuba, where she lives nowadays, Portela takes a center place in Cuban present literature. A Havanna University Graduate in Classic Languages and Literatures, she writes both fiction and essays. Besides this novel, that won the XVII Jaen Novel Award (2002) and the French critique Prix Littéraire Deux Océans - Grinzane Cavour (2003), Portela has published the novels El pájaro: pincel y tinta china (1999), La sombra del caminante (2006) and Djuna y Daniel (2008), and the short stories volumes Una extraña entre las piedras (1999) and Alguna enfermedad muy grave (2006). The critical anthology of her short stories El viejo, el asesino, yo y otros cuentos, was published by Stockcero in 2009. Published in nine languages and more than twenty countries Portela was selected as one of the most influential 39 Latin American writers less than 39 years old. This edition includes a foreword, «About the black novel: poetry and politics in Cien botellas en la pared», by Iraida H. Lopez, that deals with police fiction in Cuba as well as in the Latin American context, and proposes reading this work as a black novel. Hundreds of footnotes, by the author as well as by the Literary Editor, deal with both lexical, cultural, literary and historic background references, transforming this edition into a great opportunity to fully enjoy the fiction of this unique Cuban novelist.
