The Return of Felix Nogara

A major new novel of exile by the author of the critically acclaimed Marks of Birth. Critics called Pablo Medina's first novel, Marks of Birth, deserving of "a prominent spot in today's literature of exile" (Washington Post). In his new novel--set in New York; Miami; and Barata, an imaginary island in the Caribbean--Medina again explores the condition of expatriation, this time from the vantage point of an exile who returns. Sent to the United States from his native Barata at the age of twelve, Felix Nogara moves from place to place, unable to assimilate, remaining attached to his homeland through the legacy of history, politics, and poetry he has inherited from his family. After the dictator who has ruled the island nation for two generations dies, Felix returns. With the help of a taxi driver who becomes his guide in the upside-down world of Barata, Felix sets out to find his mother and to reclaim the culture and history he considers duly his. In his travels, he encounters the past through the ruins of his city, the present in the whirlwind of politics that is shaking the country after the death of the dictator, and the future when he falls in love and marries the woman not of his dreams but of his waking. Writing in the tradition of Alejo Carpentier and Jose Lezama Lima, Medina draws upon sources as disparate as the chronicles of the Indies and other histories of the Caribbean, Don Quixote, and modern masters such as Mark Twain and Gabriel Garcia Mcrquez to establish a dialogue between actuality and memory, fact and fancy. In Felix Nogara, he has created a universal character who embodies the exile's dilemma but who finally transcends his condition.

Pablo Medina is on the faculty of the New School University in New York City.