Song of the Errant Heart (French Millennium Library, #2)

In Song of the Errant Heart, a vibrant saga of love and politics that spans three countries, three generations, three wars and a revolution, novelist and playwright Manet tells the story of Leonardo Esteban, a career Cuban diplomat who suddenly, after a successful series of negotiations with French businessmen and for no explicable reason, informs his superiors in Havana that he will remain in France, in the Basque country, for an indeterminate time, on "personal business." This act of rebellion starts a chain reaction in the uppermost levels of the Cuban state. Esteban's mistress, Berta Maria Diaz (intimately "Belle," to her lover), a high civil servant herself, married to a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and sister of one of the most powerful men in the country - a black colonel in the State Security apparatus - is sent to France to bring him back. The time the couple will spend together near the Basque town of San Sebastian and the outcome of their attempts to resolve an eleven-year love affair are the devices Manet uses to bring to bear on contemporary events his broad, loving knowledge of Cuban history and his profound understanding of the forces that move humankind. A distant grand-uncle who fought for Spain in the Spanish-Cuban war, a Basque godfather who rescued the young Esteban and his mother from certain moral destruction in Batista's Cuba, a Basque businessman who is a Sephardic Jew converted to Catholicism and Gaullism and a peasant cousin who raises horses are the players cast on a backdrop of great events against which spins out this magnificent love story that will leave no reader indifferent to Cuba or to the fate of human beings whose lives are governed by the apparatus of the state.

While living in Cuba in the 1960s, Eduardo Manet was Director of the Cuban Theater Center, Editor of the magazine Cine Cubano and director/screenwriter at the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) where he made four feature films and six shorts. In exile in France since 1969, he nonetheless remains up to date on developments in Cuba and maintains good relations with a number of Cuban creators as well as with numerous Cuban-Americans in Florida and New York.

A French citizen since 1979, Manet resides in Paris. Well-known in the worlds of the theater, cinema and opera (he penned the libretto of Cécilia, whose world premiere was in Monte Carlo), he has published many award-winning novels including The Island of the Green Lizard (Prix Goncourt) and Cuban Rhapsody (Prix Interallié). His novel in French, La sagesse du singe (Chimpanzee Wisdom) was released in April 2001. Song of the Errant Heart is the first of Manet's novels to be published in English.

"(Manet's) words will ring oh-so-true in Miami" ... (will) engage readers familiar with Cuban affairs.

-- Miami Herald, October 14, 2001