Last Night I Spent with You by Mayra Montero, Edith Grossman (Translator)

From the Publisher

One of the most original and provocative writers from the Caribbean, Mayra Montero is the author of the highly praised novels In the Palm of Darkness and The Messenger, set in Haiti and Cuba respectively. In The Last Night I Spent with You, she explores the mysterious and myriad pathways that desire can fray through the realms of memory and imagination.

Celia and Fernando, a long-married couple suddenly alone after their only daughter marries, embark on a cruise to the Caribbean islands to revitalize their sagging marriage. With the complicity of another passenger, the mysterious Julieta, Celia and Fernando lose themselves and their inhibitions as they turn to others to fulfill their fantasies of passion and destruction. Through a series of adventures on board the ship and on different islands, Celia and Fernando bring themselves to the brink of ecstasy and self-annihilation. As visitors on exotic soils, made delirious by the heat and their own heady lusts, the aging lovers mix fantasy and reality until their wild adventure burns itself out, nearly taking them with it.

Juxtaposed with the animal passions conjured by the married couple is a series of lyrical love letters to "Angela" from "Abel," two lovers with a secret of their own, explored but not explained until the very end, when their fate mirrors that of Celia and Fernando.

In elegant prose, The Last Night I Spent with You confronts the mysteries of death and desire with dark humor and remarkable subtlety.

Orlando Sentinel

Dazzling.

New York Times Book Review

Provacative.

Publishers Weekly

This sexually explicit novella, the fifth fiction by Cuban-born author Montero, is structured contrapuntally. In alternating first-person narratives, the short narrative's first story line concerns a middle-aged couple, long married, who take a Caribbean cruise after the wedding of their 22-year-old daughter. Fernando, the husband, is a 50-year-old accountant with a passion for music--principally old-fashioned boleros. He is also an aficionado of "gringo magazines" like National Geographic, from which he culls disturbing reports of violent animal (and sometimes human) sexual encounters. Although three years younger than his wife, he has previously engaged in only a few, unsatisfactory, infidelities. On the cruise, however, he becomes infatuated with a white-haired woman in her late 40s, who calls herself Julieta and claims to be a recently widowed harpist. Meanwhile, Fernando's wife, Celia, turns to sex with an anonymous boatman in an attempt to exorcise the haunting memories of a passionate but brutal and guilt-ridden affair that caused her, 14 years ago, to neglect her dying father and her daughter. A second, less fully developed story--marred in its development by a few lapses in narrative logic--is set forth in brief letters to a mysterious Angela from a lover called Abel, meshing finally with the stories of Fernando's family. The references to song lyrics throughout will not resonate with those to whom "bolero" means only Ravel's wordless composition. But knowledge of that notoriously sensual music is enough to appreciate the long, breathless sentences that depict and simulate the characters' actual and imaginary couplings. Montero's deadpan humor sharpens her account of the passions of her middle-aged protagonists, and she adroitly establishes Fernando and Celia's separate viewpoints in her flexible, hypnotic prose. 4-city author tour. (June) FYI: Montero's novel was a finalist for Spain's Sonrisa Prize for erotic literary fiction. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

A Spanish dance in simple triple time, the bolero is danced by one or several couples. Think of the Ravel composition of that name, in which a single theme is repeated over and over, becoming louder and more intense as the music progresses, and you have the appropriate metaphor for the latest novel by Montero (The Messenger). Celia and Fernando, long-married empty nesters, cruise the Caribbean Islands, searching to add spice to their relationship. They meet the mysterious Julieta during their island-hopping, partner-swapping adventures of erotic ecstasy and animal passion. As these adventures continue, their intensity increases, climaxing with the revelation of Julieta's secret. This book is not recommended to those who are squeamish about sex or those who prefer their novels intricately plotted. But for readers who enjoy brief novels, graphic lust, tropical settings, and explorations of the linked fantasies of passion and destruction--well, this is the book for them.--Yvette Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

The New York Times Book Review - James Polk

[T]he novel is certainly provocative, and it certainly challenges a few cherished assumptions, which is what fiction, at its best, should do.

Kirkus Reviews

The Cuban-born author's fifth novel (and third in English translation, following In the Palm of Darkness, 19xx, and The Messenger, 19xx) depicts in profuse erotic detail the temptations to which a middle-aged married couple separately succumb during a Caribbean vacation voyage. Fernando, a seemingly stodgy accountant, and his lively (slightly older) wife Celia journey around the islands, en route to Martinique, in the wake of their only daughter's marriage and their own aroused awareness of time passing—and mortality. He dallies with a sultry fellow passenger, Julieta (amusingly enough, she says she's a harpist), while indulging rather less celestial memories of his many happy couplings with Celia, as well as the occasional past infidelity. Celia, meanwhile, remembers her own satisfying sexual career (Fernando doesn't know she has carried on an extended affair with her importunate lover Agustin) and enjoys a fling with a remarkably endowed black boatman. Meanwhile, the seductive rhythms of the bolero are continually heard in the novel's background, and further counterpoint is provided by a series of letters addressed to an unidentified `Angela` by her lover `Abel.` The mystery of their correspondence, and its connection to the relationship of Fernando and Celia, is deftly revealed in the complex denouement—which also explains the enigmatic Julieta's true nature. Montero also deepens the story's agreeably bizarre texture with frequently hilarious comparisons of the varieties of human sexual response to the mating rituals of numerous other lovestruck creatures (informing us, for example, that `the curved claws of . . . male owls are out of control during coitus, they leavethesoft backs of their mates permanently bent`). An insouciantly witty celebration of the mingled folly and grandeur of physical love and its discontents. The best so far from one of Latin America's most impressive recent exports.

What People Are Saying

Bob Shacochis
Like Alejo Carpentier before her, Mayra Montero has used the vivid and ever—voalitle palette of Haiti to paint the darkly swirling essences of the Caribbean experience, a new world haunted by ancient spirits.

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