BOOKS

...At the end of his imprisonment and confinement at a military hospital, Padilla wrote his confession...

...Both comment on the status of women in many cultures whose strictures attempt to stifle their creative expression, the faculty which defines what it means to be human...

...His memoir, Self-Portrait of the Other, is a selective reflection on his life in Cuba...

...It brings to mind the notion that most of the works in history signed "Anonymous" were probably the creations of women who, one way or another, managed to get their stories told...

...In 1971, the police reached their breaking point...

...Though his memoir sounds the theme of the poet as political outsider, he strutted his stuff in the most public places...

...Formerly, Aunt Lydia explains, "We were a society dying of too much choice...

...It's easy to nitpick a work of this kind for its occasional omissions or errors...

...Castro's notion of unity left no room for independent voices to serve as defenders of the revolution...

...But it's more appropriate to express appreciation for a major achievement that is bound to be a valuable reference for many years to come...

...During meal time he table-hopped, introducing himself to foreign journalists or visitors, eating two to three meals a day off their expense accounts and sharing a few drinks...

...Padilla criticized the men and women who were constructing a new country and making terrible mistakes...

...But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone...

...In between are brief sketches of individuals, organizations, movements, issues, and publications—many with suggestions for further reading...

...Upon his release, Padilla, obeying the formal demands of his inquisitors, read a mea culpa to his fellow writers and artists...

...Like Allende's tale, however, Atwood's goes beyond the immediate circumstances of the story...

...Actually," it reads, "that reminds me of a story...

...The government's solution is a system of Biblically based polygamous arrangements whereby women who have already demonstrated fertility are assigned to wealthy men for breeding...

...Eva doubts,' however, that the mass audience understands what she writes, "habituated as they were to jealousy, scorn, ambition, or at least virginity...

...The United States welcomed him, provided him with an easy, well-paying job, and ignores him...

...As in a nunnery too, there are few mirrors...

...5.95...

...A result is the increasing concern with the nature and function of language, symbolically and semiotically...

...The epigraph of Allende's Eva Luna is from A Thousand and One Nights and reminds us that women are traditionally among our most important storytellers, not only for our pleasure but quite literally to save their own lives...

...That, at least, is what Padilla says his official inquisitors told him...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Left Spectrum ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas...

...I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing...

...Padilla's remarks, a parody of Stalinist purge-trial confessions of the 1930s, inflamed liberal intellectuals in Europe and the United States...

...My point is that in recent years critics and devoted lay readers have been discovering that the most interesting aspects of literature in our time have less to do with great writers than with the great power of storytelling itself...

...That is their sole purpose in life...

...Heads of state and Nobel Prize winners pleaded with Castro to release the poet, and in 1980 he was permitted to go to the United States...

...He says in his book that he was brutally beaten, though he told friends after his release that "they never even touched me, except to put a hand on my shoulder from time to time...

...In addition, he accused several of his friends of harboring counterrevolutionary attitudes and leading bourgeois life styles...

...Though he offered no alternative, he assured his listeners that there were voices of reason inside the government and Party who could, if given the chance, make the revolution work efficiently...

...But what of Jose Marti, who wrote sensitive verse and led his troops into battle—and who, more than Lenin, is Castro's model and mentor...

...The Bluestein family's latest recording is "Shut Up and Sing," a Greenhays CD production distributed by Flying Fish...

...I pick them up, pull them onto my hands, finger by finger...

...95.00...

...A childhood friend becomes a major opponent of the military dictatorship, and Eva herself becomes involved in dangerous political activities...

...the stones steam and blood boils in the veins...

...After a while they receive the printout...

...others defected, or found ways of adjusting to the unpredictable changes in the Party Line that were part of intellectual life in the new society...

...and they went off to bed every night with their heads spinning from dashes of snakebitten Indians, embalmers in wheelchairs, teachers hanged by their students" and many other details "that defied all laws of television romance...

...Shortly after he arrived in New York, Padilla began a new round of literary attacks on Castro and the Cuban revolution...

...It is almost opposite in style from Allende's work, but stresses the same sense of storytelling as a survival technique...

...In 1968, I was making a film about Fidel, and Padilla was hanging around the Habana Libre Hotel where I was staying...

...But for Offred the only thing that counts is her awareness that she is telling a story: "Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden...

...The main character, Offred (all women are renamed after their masters...

...He attacked Castro for importing Soviet systems of education, economics, and accounting...

...Padilla's eagerness to criticize the revolution, at a time when few other Cubans dared, won him a reputation in the foreign community and brought him to the attention of the political police...

...While describing his ordeal at the hands of the State Security bureaucracy, Padilla details what he sees as a failure to achieve a cultural revolution in Cuba...

...The prestigious PEN and the New York Review of Books took up his cause...

...The story takes place where "time is bent and distances deceive the human eye, persuading the traveler to wander in circles...

...Unlike earlier periods, when James Joyce and his contemporaries were inventing or perfecting narrative techniques which even in their milder forms quickly became ubiquitous, we have no towering figures whose influence extends in all directions...

...the revolution combined solid information, horrendous rumors, and a vague alternative he described as "real" communism...

...Padilla's defense of "culture" is, in fact, a demand for equal rights for the uncommitted, the detached artists who choose to stand aloof from the struggles of a society caught up in revolutionary crisis...

...Among the authors themselves, women tend to provide the most compelling and novel sensibilities...

...I knew Padilla in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s...

...Like her compatriots, Isabel Allende bases her language on closely observed tropical phenomena that quickly transform themselves into dream images and unsettling glimpses of spiritual worlds...

...From the beginning, Eva recognizes her ability to tell stories and uses the skill to make friends, obtain favors, and finally to establish a place for herself in the world...

...THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood Fawcett/Crest...

...The innovators, in recent times, have been more likely to be critics who write like poets and novelists, invent their own language, and sometimes are as difficult to fathom as stream-of-conscious-ness fabulists...

...The humid, heavy air smells of flowers, herbs, man's sweat, and animal breath...

...Allende traces Eva's development through a range of political developments as well...

...Time here is measured by bells, as once in nunneries...

...395 pp...

...Cuban machismo endures...

...Castro, he says, transformed the political and economic landscape, but did not bring the same zeal to the cultural struggle...

...He complained to an interviewer not long ago that the American Left refuses to acknowledge his existence...

...928 pp...

...Despite many diverse plot strategies, the book moves clearly and quickly to its conclusion (the translation is felicitous) with Eva retelling her stories on national television...

...18.95...

...When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be...

...272 pp...

...Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was originally published in 1986 and is now available in paperback...

...But it is a rare autobiographer who will include unflattering material in a tendentious literary tract, and for the creative writer, the fine line between fact and fiction is often blurred...

...This is a familiar landscape by now, the locus of South America's "magic realism" school of writers...

...Padilla, they concluded, had been coerced—possibly tortured—into making his absurd statement...

...At dusk the sky is filled with phosphorescent mosquitoes whose bites produce endless nightmares, and the still night air carries the distinct cries of birds, the chattering of monkeys, and the distant roar of the waterfalls born high in the mountains to crash far below like the thunder of warfare...

...He claims, too, that Castro justified the poet's arrest by quoting Robespierre: "It is better to sin through excess than through default, which can only lead to failure...

...He claims to have had a visit from Castro during his hospital incarceration, though his friends wonder why he never mentioned that visit before...

...This book, an attempt at self-justification, tries but fails to breathe new life into the Padilla affair...

...Offred's Commander brings her to a secret club where all the laws of the society are conspicuously flaunted...

...Some became yes men when the revolution triumphed...

...Atwood invents many social customs for her creation...

...by Saul Landau In 1971, Cuban State Security agents arrested the poet Heberto Padilla and held him for thirty-seven days without charging him with a crime...

...Padilla recalls Castro's alleged last words to him: "Even though you will never admit it publicly, I know that this revolution will grow in your memory, and you will find out that the best years of your life were lived when you were supporting it, before you got sick and embittered...

...Storytellers EVA LUNA By Isabel Allende Alfred A. Knopf...

...in this case, she is Of Fred as others are "Ofglen" or "Ofwarren"), lives in a former school dormitory: "The bell that measures time is ringing...

...Hypocrisy is the watchword...

...In the first half of the book, Padilla tells how, using his Cuban revolutionary credentials as a passport, he gained access to the illustrious circles of the world's leading intellectuals—Sartre and Camus, Yevtu-shenko and Voznesensky, Goytisolo and Semprun...

...It's not exactly high culture, but Eva explains that she was overwhelmed by "the all-encompassing power of words": "Reality is a jumble we can't always measure or decipher...

...As in every authoritarian society, there is endless gossip and rumor-mongering...

...The United States has been converted into the fundamentalist religious Republic of Gilead where the rate of population increase (among Caucasians) has plummeted because of AIDS, venereal disease, and environmental poisoning...

...He blamed the snafus, the waste, the errors in planning on Castro and other top government officials...

...Padilla welcomed the notoriety Castro unwittingly conferred on him...

...Where the paths of poetry and politics cross," Padilla writes, "there is little room for reconciliation...

...In a well-known computer joke, a group of anxious scientists inquires of a supercomputer: "Will computers ever replace human beings...

...The books by the Chilean Isabel Allende and the Canadian Margaret Atwood provide good examples...

...Garland Publishing...

...it omits facts and events that would tend to raise doubts about the poet's character, and adds incidents that may have occurred only in his fertile imagination...

...The red gloves are lying on the bed...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches American Studies at California State University in Fresno...

...The heat is oppressive, unalle-viated by any breeze...

...At the time, his critique of Castro and Saul Landau, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., wrote "Cuba: Socialism on One Island...

...The Encyclopedia begins with an article on Abortion/Reproductive Rights and ends with Di Zukunft, a radical Yiddish periodical founded in 1890...

...The editors describe this as "the first comprehensive reference work on the history of the American Left," and the claim does not seem inflated...

...I try to open a path through that maze, to put order in that chaos, to make life more bearable...

...Regardless of any misgivings he may have had then about the ethics of Fi-delista power, Padilla represented the Cuban revolution to the world...

...The handmaids are in other respects treated like nuns and denied any sense of their own identities...

...Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us...

...In the end her narration survives on a series of tape recordings probably made in some sort of safe-house on the Underground Femaleroad...

...That is the history of Eva, who explains that her name "means life, according to a book of names my mother consulted...

...Black markets exist in everything from lipstick and cigarettes to outright promiscuity...

...There are the aunts and the Marthas who preside over the handmaids and underscore the ideology of servitude...

...Few of the most noted Cuban artists of Castro's generation, like Padilla, fought in the mountains or in the urban underground against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista...

...in the June issue of The Progressive...

...Despite the regime's explicit denunciations, however, Padilla won the acclaimed Casa de las Americas award for his poetry in 1969...

...Those who kept him under surveillance suspected Padilla was conspiring with a Chilean diplomat and believed the novel Padilla was writing would be smuggled out of the country and used to subvert not only the Cuban revolution but also Salvador Allende's experiment in Chile...