Café Nostalgia: Art and Exile

The novel Café nostalgia oscillates between past and present, between Cuban life and exiled existence, and finally between the protagonist’s life and a work of art, a tapestry. The technique of de-centering, used by Severo Sarduy to describe the neobaroque and by Linda Hutcheon to describe postmodernism, are an intricate part of the dual, sometimes multidimensional, nature of this novel. To study afé nostalgia by only looking at the relationship between the novel and the collection of tapestries,The Lady and the Unicorn, is to concentrate only on the relationship of the individual to the collective past. To examine the novel as only an exile experience is to contemplate only the singular experience of the individual. In order to be able to understand the complexity of the novel, one must look at the theme of exile as a revelation of the individual’s past in conjunction with the art that reveals the collective past of the human experience. The interplay between art and life echoes the protagonist’s search for meaningful interaction in her new home, Paris. The tapestries connect her to the cultural heritage of Western societies and give the protagonist a new lease on life.