Infiel y Otros Cuentos (Edición en español)

Love and emigration are the two themes that serve as a common thread in these eight short stories by Mylene Fernandez Pintado. In Infiel, the story that gives the book its title, a woman justifies her infidelity to herself by saying that it frees her from routine and makes her a better wife, until fate confronts her with the fragility of her convictions and her inner world. The protagonist of Efectividad simbólica, a Cuban emigrant in a European country, confesses to herself that her reasons for leaving the island were a mixture of curiosity and a desire to live better, but that along with the physical attributes of the tropics, she also banished speaking loudly, laughing out loud, lustful phrases in bed and the desire for someone to love her.
With precise language and well-calibrated plots, Mylene Fernandez Pintado talks about jealousy, infidelity, promises of dubious fulfillment to Saint Anthony of Papua to attract the man with whom she lives a passionate and tortuous relationship, offerings to Ochun in the midst of a climate alien to the goddess, the gentrification process in the Havana style, a mother whose approaching end confronts her daughter with a situation in which no one would want to find themselves.
More than the solution to the problems posed by these stories, what captivates when reading them is the relentless delving of the protagonists into their inner selves, in search of themselves. The frankness and intensity with which they explore their feelings and behavior, whose lucid introspection lacks palliatives, make Infiel y otros cuentos an extraordinary book.