DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro

Norberto Fuentes author Anna Kushner translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:1st Feb '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro cover

An audacious “biography” of the ex-president of Cuba told in Castro’s own outrageous, bombastic voice. Prize-winning author and journalist Norberto Fuentes was once a revolutionary: a writer with privileged access to Fidel Castro’s inner circle during some the most challenging years of the revolution. But in the late 1990s, as the regime began sending its oldest comrades to the firing squad, he became A Man Who Knew Too Much. Escaping a death sentence and now living in exile, Fuentes has written a brilliant, satirical, and utterly captivating “autobiography” of the Cuban leader—in Fidel’s own arrogant and seductive language—discussing everything from Castro’s early sexual experiences in Birán to his true feelings about Che Guevara and his philosophy on murder, legacy, and state secrets. Critics have long admired Fuentes’s writing; one U.S. article called him “Norman Mailer’s Cuban pen pal.” Akin to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, or Edmund Morris’s Dutch, this wickedly entertaining, true-to-life masterpiece is as imaginative and outsized as Castro himself.

"A brilliant, funny, ultimately deeply moving novel, an unforgettable portrait of Fidel and at the same time an historically important first-person account of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath." -- Russell Banks "Norberto Fuentes has given us a new Fidel: colloquial, arrogant, dramatic, comic, and cosmically egocentric ... an enormously readable and entertaining literary achievement of a high order." -- William Kennedy "So convincing that readers may forget this is fiction." "Deliciously wicked ... entertaining, edifying and voluminous ... a masterful act of ventriloquism." -- Ann Louise Bardarch

ISBN: 9780393339031

Dimensions: 208mm x 140mm x 28mm

Weight: 661g

594 pages