Unfortunately I'm still missing one volume in Padura's Havanna Quartet so I cannot make a ruling on the 'set' overall. However, Havana Red -- the first in the series -- is the most thoughtful.Leonardo Padura is a remarkable novelist not only in the way he engages his themes but also in the way he constructs his stories.Superficially, the Havana Quartet is made up of 4 stories about the Havana police inspector, Mario Conde, who is depicted as a contemporary hard boiled investigator, a la Philip Marlowe. He even comes across as a bit of a gender dinosaur fueled by plenty of Cuban machismo (and rum). But this impression, seductive as it may be in delivering to your hands some Latin pulp fiction exotic, is deceptive. For one thing Padura doesn't write to rule. The plot and the murder that justifies the plotting is really a frame to hang a discourse on about Cuban society. To do this Padura utilizes some creative effects which turn his novels into drama and like some ancient Greek play, you get treated to these long monologues articulating much more that what supposedly is a record of a police interrogation .Padura does indeed calls his novels 'metaphors' and after you've read a few of them you get the meaning of the fictional journey much sooner than if you were only reading with relaxation in mind.In that regard, Havana Red is the most sophisticated of the three I've read from the quartet. While it certainly deserves its numerous literary prizes, Padura also has a mission other than a purely literary one. He deploys the Conde as a excuse to explore the Cuban approach to homosexuality and creative freedom. In the novel, a gay character had suffered much for his sexual preference and his avaunt garde approach to the theatre. This tragedy, which reflects the actual impact of some approaches that were pursued in the early seventies, is the montage that deepens the political and social meaning of the murder of a young transvestite. Anyone familiar with the history of homophobia in Cuba should recognize that "Latin machismo, Catholic bigotry, and anti-gay Stalinism combined in the early years of the Revolution to limit specific legal reforms for lesbians and gays." What Padura does is try to draw up an accounting of that as it relates to , what was, when the novel was published, the early nineties. This quest for meaning in the context of the actual revolution as is -- warts and all -- is the most exciting and , I think, creative feature of Padura's writing.I think a lot of readers may miss this insightful approach to these topics and read Padura's works as throwaway paper backs. But there's real artistry here, and there is a lot more than story telling being told. I think Padura has been able to take the crime novel into the realm of a broader significance without being in the least bit polemical about it. In doing that he launches into a discussion with his generation of Cubans. This isn't the intense outcry of angry young men and women, in the protest way we are used to in our capitalism. Mario Conde's mission -- one fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, sex and an obsessive sense of righteousness-- is a quest for identity.
http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20... Σπανίως με ενθουσιάζουν αστυνομικά μυθιστορήματα που αφήνουν λίγα στη φαντασία, σε τούτο δω πάντως, παρ’ όλο που ήξερα με βεβαιότητα σχεδόν από την αρχή τον δολοφόνο, με κράτησε η γραφή, το θέμα και ο εξαιρετικός κεντρικός χαρακτήρας. Στην Αβάνα ο αστυνόμος Μάριο Κόντε αναλαμβάνει να εξιχνιάσει ένα περίεργο έγκλημα με θύμα μια τραβεστί ντυμένη με ένα κατακόκκινο φόρεμα που βρίσκεται στραγγαλισμένη στο κεντρικό Πάρκο. Στην πορεία της έρευνας ο Κόντε γνωρίζει τον κόσμο των ομοφυλοφίλων της Αβάνας, έναν σκηνοθέτη και συγγραφέα που είναι αδελφή κατατρεγμένη από το σύστημα, μια γυναίκα με το κωλαράκι ενός σπουργιτιού, θυμάται από την αρχή πως πάντα ήθελε να γίνει συγγραφέας. Η εξέλιξη του χαρακτήρα είναι ομαλή, αλλά ταυτόχρονα με εκπλήξεις και η ροή της αφήγησης εθιστική. Πρόκειται για ένα βιβλίο ρουφηχτό. Στην τελική ανάλυση ίσως η έξη μου από τους Λατινοαμερικάνους συγγραφείς να χρήζει κάποιας ψυχιατρικής συμβουλής……
What do You think about Havana Red (2005)?
I did not like at all the predictable motive of the macho man who suddenly, unexpectedly and unwillingly falls into the weirdly mythical, always foreign and rejected world of the homosexual/drag queen. I wanted to believe this was about the regular, privileged heterosexual man discovering otherness in a flawed yet compassionate way, but this book never achieved to convey that to me. Instead, I feel like it got lost in the cliché inability of said privileged heterosexual man to see true humanity in otherness and it never got beyond that. I would expect literary worlds to be richer than that; to show human complexity in a display unlike the clumsy interactions we have with people who are different to us in every day life. The main character's "compassion" and "struggle" in dealing with otherness felt forced, deminishing the characters representing that otherness to mere tropes. They never felt human.
—Topf
Ένα αρκετά καλο αστυνομικό μυθιστόρημα με άρτια πλοκή και δυνατούς ήρωες που θυμίζουν ήρωες τραγωδίας. Ο θάνατος ενός νεαρού ομοφυλόφιλου ξετυλίγει το κουβάρι της ιστορίας. Ο Μάριο Κοντε καλείται να λύσει την υπόθεση. Ένας αστυνομικός που εχει πάθη αλλα και ρατσιστικά συναισθήματα απέναντι στους ομοφυλοφιλους. Το θέμα της ομοφυλοφιλίας παίρνει διαστάσεις φιλοσοφικές-υπαρξιακές μεσα στο μυθιστόρημα. Η παρενδυσια δεν αναφέρεται μόνο στην κυριολεκτική της σημασία αλλα και στη μεταφορική θέλοντας να καταδείξει οτι μάσκες φοράμε λίγο πολυ ολοι μας....
—Tonia
Started this on the plane to California, finished it on the flight home. I picked it up b/c of an article about Padura in the New Yorker--a Cuban writer who managed to avoid censorship by the Castro regime by writing detective novels. I'm not sure what to think about this b/c the book in fact contained considerable criticism of past (if not present) Cuban policies and behavior toward artists. It certainly does not seem discreet. The writer is engaging and philosophically reflective. I'm not really a crime fan, so I'm not really the intended audience. The solution to the crime did not strike me as especially interesting--in fact I feel like I imagined a more interesting ending myself. What I read was marred by a few oddities--presumably in the translation or the editing: We find the metaphor rendered as "down the shoot" (rather than "chute"), Jesus is said to have turned wine into water, and Camus' famous novel is called (in the English) "The Outsider" rather than "The Stranger." And in general there were spots were the sentences were somewhat stilted or awkward. I can't tell at what stage these infelicities appeared, but the author seems not to have been well-served. Overall it was worth reading, but I will probably not read the others in the "Havana seasons" series. While Cuba was not included in Bush's "axis of evil," I'm glad to read good work by a fine author from a country we officially oppose.
—James Klagge
