by Luis Rafael Sánchez
Here is a first novel with a text that's somewhere between jive and poetry about characters who have remarkable, wild, terrible and very funny lives. It is set in Puerto Rico, and the whole book is a kind of tropical dance composed of words instead of drumbeats. The author is a professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico, and the English is by Gregory Rabassa, who has translated Gabriel Garcia Márquez, among others. Macho Camacho's Beat is hot, vivid, original and a very convincing evocation of life in San Juan. Go with the beat. (Pantheon, $10.95)
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