The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cuban History

The first of these three stories, ‘The Great Exception’, is a Borges-like counterfactual fake that tells the truth of Cuban national origins in the sexual fantasies of Queen Isabella. From the island’s discovery by Columbus, who is killed, cooked, eaten, and assimilated by the aboriginal inhabitants, to its development as a decaying tropical Paris, to its virtual annexation (along with the Kingdom of Hawaii) by the United States, the constant theme is sexual vice. The ‘exception’ in question seems to be the accidental discovery of the Americas. Or perhaps it refers to this latter military/political event, an exception to the myth of American exceptionalism. They did, of course, what any big country does to smaller ones - they enslaved it in imperial rule.

‘Debouchment’ covers the subsequent period in Cuban history, “the era after the Spanish ate the parrots to extinction (while the natives stuck to grilled banana heart), and before the Russians came, with their Brutalist architecture and their smoked pig’s fat.” This is a time, after the abolition of slavery, of the rationalisation of continuing racial and economic oppression. Deterioration continued but now “with amber Lalique windows, and the addition of cheval-de-frise on the low walls of Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting.” And the essentials of Cuban life remained constant: “syphilis, tobacco, and trees with fruit whose flesh is the pink of healthy mucus membranes.” But this all stopped abruptly when Castro’s bandits bombed the Pan-American Club.

The title story of Rachel K is a case study of the depravity of 1950’s Cuba. A former French Nazi masquerading as a diplomat tangles with a faux-French stripper with painted-on faux-net stockings. She is a prostitute who “makes a life out of twilight.” Like the country itself “The boundary between her private life and public life has blurred, as has the boundary between engaging her body only in intimate pleasures with people she trusts, and using it as an object she owns.” ‘K’, after all, is not just for Kushner, but also for what one uses in German to spell the name of the country.

In Havana the French Nazi “found occupied Paris all over again.” Better than Paris because it wasn’t occupied by other soldiers in the midst of war but by the corporate executives of international companies on the make. “It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes.” Rachel ignores him, then teases him, then engages him in intimate conversation during which the “Nothingness” that is in these people, their un-mappable emptiness, continues to leak away into the recorded national past.

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