TROPICAL DEPRESSION

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The title of Pico Iyer's fine, rich and heady first novel, Cuba and the Night (Knopf; 234 pages; $22), comes from a line of poetry written by Josa Mart’: "Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche" (Two fatherlands have I: Cuba and the night). The implication being, and it is one the novel endorses, that when the sun goes down, principles crumble away, loyalties falter, certainties dissolve. The dichotomy and the dilemma are all the stronger, one imagines, if you are not a Cuban. Iyer, who occasionally writes essays for Time, conjures up Cuba as a kind of permanent night; for the foreign visitor it is enough merely to set foot in the country to experience that sense of dissociation, that loss of self and sense.

"I looked out at the sea," he writes. "Sometimes the place was so beautiful it made you want to cry almost. It was like seeing some young, lovely woman on the arm of a short, sleazy general. The soft breeze off the sea; the intermittent light of cars, winking along the Malecon; the Nacional above us, like a giant beached galleon: it was like a romantic's Eden. And here I was with the brightest Eve in Havana, and she was asking me to rescue her from Paradise."

The romantic in question, and the narrator of this novel, is an American photographer named Richard. In the course of the few years covered in the novel's scope, starting in 1987, he makes five visits to Cuba, and in each one he becomes progressively more embroiled in the mysteries and particular frustrations of the place, not least because he has fallen in love with a Cuban girl called Lourdes.

Lourdes, like a Chekhovian heroine yearning for Moscow, has dreams only of leaving for the U.S., and this American may be her passport out. But Richard already has a wife, and in order to rescue his Eve he has to enlist the support of an acquaintance, a dull young English schoolteacher named Hugo, in a marriage of convenience. How the plans go awry and what consequences await the sultry Lourdes in provincial England provide one of the novel's darker, not to say drizzlier, ironies. As another character remarks, "In Cuba, you believe everything or you believe nothing. Because everything is crazy ... Nothing makes sense in Cuba." Under these circumstances Richard should have realized that nothing was going to go as he envisioned.

It is one of the subtle strengths of this novel that it quietly subverts the note of tropical passion and romance that it initially seems to promise. Pico Iyer is among the finest travel writers of his generation, and his experience-his worldliness-endows the pages of this book with the reek of authenticity: the novel is dense and pungent with perfect detail. This same worldliness provides the undercurrent of cool reality about people's lives, their impossible dreams and inevitable disappointments, that makes Cuba and the Night the most promising and beguiling of fiction debuts.