For Cuba, I read My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a novel told in fifteen stories that are linked together–and that’s where I’m going to stop. The book cover’s blurb explains how the stories are linked, but I think I would have enjoyed the book even more if I had less information going into it. I’m going to omit any potential spoilers if you are the sort of reader who skips the book description (I’m looking right at my bookworm friend Katelin right now).

This book is a novel but it felt like a collection of wildly different short stories. One chapter was like a Biblical parable while another was a dystopian episode from 1984: The Cuba Edition. There’s a chapter written in verse about a marriage gone wrong and another chapter that feels like a fever chapter. The stories grapple with loneliness, family, immigration, and identity.

For me, the book was more about mood than story. If you only like traditional novels that follow the hero’s journey with clearly developed characters, My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not for you. But if you like poetry, or you want to ruminate upon the human experience, or you just want a divisive pick that will stir up debate for your book club, then holy crap, do I have a book for you!

My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not the sort of book I would have read before embarking on my Read Around the World quest. I was a genre fiction girl, alternating between mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, romance and the occasional thriller. I thought I loathed literary fiction and avoided it at all costs. When my muse suggested this project, I partly resisted the idea because I suspected that for many countries, the only books I would find translated into English would be literary. And I was right! For whatever reason, the literary works are more often than not the ones that are translated and made available to English-speaking audience.

Except it turns out that I enjoy literary fiction. In fact, I might be falling in love with literary fiction–but that’s another post (or podcast episode!) all together.

Maybe I won’t enjoy ever work of literary fiction that I encounter on my quest, but I thoroughly enjoyed My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog, even when it was obscure and felt like I was looking through a kaleidoscope at a painting, catching glimmers of truth, shattered glimpses of the human experience.