This was Alexis's last full-scale novel, intended as the first part of a tetralogy. It's basically grand opera: La Niña Estrellita and El Caucho catch sight of each other in the crowds celebrating Palm Sunday in Port-au-Prince, are smitten immediately, and provide us with some three hundred pages of gloriously passionate arias in free indirect speech before they end up in bed together. They are both Cuban exiles living in Haiti: she's a sex-worker in the waterfront Sensation Bar, with a column of US Marines queuing up outside her bedroom door; he's a mechanic and trade-union organiser in a shipyard. Alexis structures the story around the days of Holy Week and the senses, as their relationship progresses from sight through smell, hearing, taste and touch to that sixth sense that lovers are supposed to have.

Along the way we learn more than we might expect to about the situation of the working classes in the Caribbean and what should be done to improve it. Alexis does exploit the exotic brothel setting for all it's worth (including rather more male-gaze-type lesbian soft porn than strictly necessary), but he also makes it clear that the women are every bit as much exploited workers and victims of capitalism as the men in the shipyard (it's no accident that the US Navy is in port).

Fun, in the sort of way Porgy and Bess would be with a libretto by Friedrich Engels and Henry Miller... ( )