The raven is one of the most frequently mentioned birds in literature. The father of modern short stories and horror, Edgar Allan Poe, made it the protagonist of one of the most famous poems in literature. Guillermo Vidal, one of the fathers of the contemporary tuna story, did the same many years later when he wrote Los Cuervos (The Ravens), Letras Cubanas, 2002, and Sanlope, 2004.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- I call Vidal this because he influences the style and themes of writers from his province. Also because of the transcendence and transgression that he had and still has within local and national literature.
Los Cuervos tells the life of the protagonist from his childhood to his adulthood. Vidal could not begin higher, with a greater hook, than to recount, from the child's point of view, the death of his four-year-old sister and the murder of his father by his mother. She set him on fire in his sleep.
For being an abuser.
For being drunk.
For being a bad father.
For exhaustion.
All this happens in the first pages.
From then on, Guillermo Vidal, with total mastery, narrates the protagonist's growth through his first-person account. Not only literally, through what he tells us, but also through language. Over time, the character's language grows, improves, and evolves. The way of understanding the world changes as well.
The author recreates for us the era of a Cuba forgotten or unknown to many, but true. With real problems. Abuse at home, machismo, marginalization, the prison world, homosexuality, the rape of a man (the main character) by his aunt's girlfriend, the disappointment of first love, and much more.
Two excellent monologues by Carmen, one of the richest characters in the story, which help us see everything from a different perspective are inserted in the 12 chapters that make up the novel, there are. Something similar happens with the fragments of the diaries of the aunts who raised the protagonist.
In Los Cuervos we find secondary stories that are just as rich, full of nuances, and attractive as the main story. For example, the story of Moro (the neighborhood delinquent) and Manuel, the protagonist's friend, and aspiring gangster, or the story of Carmen herself, who repeatedly sexually abused her friend's nephew.
