Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Paperback | Pages: 392 pages Rating: 3.76 | 3270 Users | 305 Reviews
Present Of Books Dirty Havana Trilogy
| Title | : | Dirty Havana Trilogy |
| Author | : | Pedro Juan Gutiérrez |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 392 pages |
| Published | : | February 5th 2002 by Ecco (first published 1994) |
| Categories | : | Fiction |
Chronicle To Books Dirty Havana Trilogy
For the last four decades, Fidel Castro's communist Cuba has survived a harsh economic blockade. In 1993, Castro attempted economic reform by allowing Cubans to use U.S. dollars and begin their own business ventures—"a huge messy free-for-all." This time of confused, low-rent capitalism is the backdrop for Pedro Juan Gutierrez's gritty, powerful, and atmospheric novel-in-stories, Dirty Havana Trilogy, translated from the original Spanish version by Natasha Wimmer.Gutierrez, whose prose sings of grime and simple, hard-clay truths, much like the words of Junot DÃaz, is a well-known member of the Latin American visual poetry movement and a magazine journalist living in Havana. Dirty Havana Trilogy is written from the semiautobiographical point of view of Pedro Juan, a 40-year-old sex-starved ex-radio journalist cobbling together an existence by selling everything from himself to drugs to whatever he can get his hands on. "Everything's worth something here," he writes.
Pedro Juan is an ex-radio journalist because in a "model" communist society nothing bad is acceptable news. Through his tormented lead character, Gutierrez provides a window into his reasons for writing such a crude book. "That's why I was disillusioned with journalism and why I started to write raw stories.... I write to jar people a little and force others to wake up and smell the shit.... That's how I terrorize cowards and mess with people who like to muzzle those of us who speak up.... My stories could run bare-assed out into the middle of the street, shouting, 'Freedom, freedom, freedom.'"
That said, be warned: Dirty Havana Trilogy is not for the faint of heart. It is raw, squarely confronting poverty, racism, violence, prostitution, and the lengths Cubans go to in order to secure the almighty buck. In one story, the man who lives across the hall from Pedro Juan, in the crumbling apartment building that serves as the focal point for much of the book, is busted by the cops for stealing human livers from the morgue and selling them on the streets as pork livers.
But survival isn't the only thing on the minds of Gutierrez's colorful characters. Oddly enough, it's the quest for release, for fits of pleasure, for some sliver of happiness no matter how warped the avenue may seem to the world outside Havana. And that quest is manifested in the hard-core sex that permeates the pages of the book. An orgasm is one of the few pleasures no one can be denied. As violent and nauseating as the sex -- and the life -- may seem on the surface, Gutierrez achieves the difficult task of lifting his characters from the muck, giving his Dirty Havana Trilogy an intellectual and emotional depth that far outweighs the carnal.
Near the end Gutierrez writes, "Born in the ruins, they just kept trying not to give up or let themselves be beaten so severely that at last they were forced to surrender. Anything was possible, everything allowed, except defeat." The book then becomes a manifesto, a well-wrought fight against literary persecution, a release the same as an orgasm, where the truth behind every dark corner, behind every door, must be told. Dirty Havana Trilogy comes from the same womb in which literature was born, a book that just may someday be held up beside those of the mighty dead.
Nelson Taylor is a freelance writer and author of the travel guide America Bizarro, published by St. Martin's Press.
Specify Books Concering Dirty Havana Trilogy
| Original Title: | TrilogÃa sucia de La Habana |
| ISBN: | 0060006897 (ISBN13: 9780060006891) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Havana(Cuba) |
Rating Of Books Dirty Havana Trilogy
Ratings: 3.76 From 3270 Users | 305 ReviewsDiscuss Of Books Dirty Havana Trilogy
The last page was turned in NYC in 2002. It was an odd place to complete the novel. I was reading my friend Roger's copy; he had been reading it a few months earlier when we journeyed to Indy for a Pacers game. That was odd. The "that" in question is an enormous swirl of emotions and experiences that criss-crossed the Atlantic as well as the continental United States: from Long Island to San Francisco and back to Indiana. I saw a copy in London seven months later and the torque of it all wasVery glad to get this one out of the way. Gutiérrez has great ability as a writer and has created some very memorable vignettes of characters and situations in mid-1990s Havana. Unfortunately, his obsession with sex and his lavish descriptions of pretty much every variation on that theme make this a book I wouldnt recommend to anyone.The book is made up of three parts although theres no logic to them as they resemble each other almost entirely. Each part is made up of short stories that focus on
I discovered this on my husbands bookshelf while dusting it recently, and was curious about it, so thought Id give it a go. Ive kept picking this up over the last few weeks, but having read 205 pages, Ive decided to give up on it, and accept its not for me. I usually like quite gritty or shocking books, but I just couldnt connect with this. Dirty Havana Trilogy will put you off ever visiting Havana. I think its completely destroyed my positive experience of the film Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
3.8.If you are not looking to confirm a preconceived viewpoint, this book is essentially hard to digest. But it still offers you a lot to think about. I like a few aspects of the writing a lot - like the almost isolated chapters and the lack of a clear chronology -, but, in the end,the main idea here is really that humanity is quite a poor species. I wouldnt disagree!
The US-published English language edition of 'Dirty Havana Trilogy' describes it as, "A Novel in Stories". While it is a gruesome portrait of Havana in the 1990s, in my mind this is most certainly NOT a novel. It's more like snatches of life, notes on the depraved lengths that inhabitants of Fidel's Cuba had to go to in order to survive. I didn't mind that there was lots of sex and general unsavoury behaviour going on. What I did mind was that there was no discernible story arc, just more and
"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else" Italo Clavino, Invisible Cities***Just a word of warning there will be mature content in this review due to the explicit content of this novel.***This novel is a series of short vignettes that are roughly in chronological order. The book is raw, focusing on the poorest of the poor of Havana. It is 1993
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.