Very interesting and written by Padura who is an excellent crime story
writer...
Steve Novak
Cinefrog@comcast.net
734 429 4997 - off
313 300 0770 - cell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/04/best-cuban-novels-padura
Leonardo Padura's top 10 Cuban novels
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 March 2009 13.05 GMT
Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives in Cuba. He has
published a number of short-story collections and literary essays but
international fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector
Mario Conde. Like many others of his generation, Padura had faced the
question of leaving Cuba, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s, when
living conditions deteriorated sharply as Russian aid evaporated. He chose
to stay.
Buy Havana Fever at the Guardian bookshop
Cuba is a country of poets. It would almost be too easy to select 10 poets
or books of poetry that play a key role in the short history of Cuban
literature. But there are excellent and diverse Cuban novelists, too few
of whom are available in English translation. The 10 I've picked here will
hopefully give some idea of both the country's literary tradition, and its
imaginative life.
Havana Fever
by Leonardo Padura
Translated by Peter Bush
Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99
Buy it at the Guardian bookshop
1. Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier
(1962, trans. John Sturrock)
I am convinced that this is the highpoint of the Cuban novel, the perfect
fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in
narrative prose. In this account of the impact of the French Revolution in
the Caribbean, the theme is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions:
the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful
ideals.
2. Cecilia Valdés Or El Angel Hill (Cecilia Valdés) by Cirilo Villaverde
(1882, trans. Helen Lane)
This is considered to be one of the best examples of 19th century realism
and romanticism in Spanish and the finest evocation of Cuban customs of that
era. Its characters departed the novel's pages long ago to become prototypes
of what it means to be Cuban. The most beautiful and tragic love story ever
written in Cuba, it also encompasses the horrors of the African slave trade
and gives full literary expression to the city of Havana. It is the classic.
3. Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(1967, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner)
This is the book which created a literary language of Havana. It's a kind of
cathedral of words, and no translation could do it full justice, but readers
throughout the world have enjoyed Cabrera Infante's fiction thanks to his
wit and the stories he welds together in an unrivalled portrait of 1950s
Havana nightlife, the golden age of Cuban music and the city. Once you've
read this, Havana will never look the same again.
4. Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (1974, trans. Gregory Rabassa)
Admired rather than read or valued, and in many ways poetry rather than
fiction, Paradiso is one of the most influential novels in the Spanish
language. Written in a completely different register to the baroque of
Carpentier or colloquial of Cabrera Infante, the author's mastery of
language has created a whole school of "Lezamian" writers. In Paradiso, as
in any poet's novel, the way the story is told is more important than the
story itself and the digressions much more than mere anecdotes. It is a
magnificent exercise in style.
5. The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) by Alejo Carpentier (1953, trans.
Harriet de Onís)
Carpentier yet again: we could also include in this list his 1949 novel The
Kingdom of This World (1957), which gave birth to the aesthetic of "the real
and marvellous from America". As in all his work, Carpentier's perspective
is universal: he uses the journey of a western intellectual to the heart of
the South American jungle to narrate the physical possibility of going back
in time to the origins of civilisation. Its great merit, however, is the way
it makes us feel the vicissitudes experienced by the novel's musician
protagonist, who understands that individuals have no choice but to accept
the time and history fate has dealt them.
6. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
This is, of course, the best-known novel about Cuba by a non-Cuban author.
And that's fair enough: thanks to The Old Man and The Sea Hemingway was
awarded the Nobel prize, the gold medal for which still sits in the famous
shrine to Our Lady of Charity at El Cobre, the Caribbean version of the
Virgin Mary who is Cuba's patron saint. Although it merely recounts the
story of a fisherman who after eighty-four days of "bad luck" finally makes
a big catch, the novel is also about man's willpower and spirit of
endurance. A beautiful fable for the human condition.
7. Temporada de ángeles (1983), Lisandro Otero; A Season For Angels, not
translated.
Another great Cuban novel that is not set in Cuba: it goes back to the
English Industrial Revolution, the beheading of Charles I and rule by Oliver
Cromwell. It too makes a critique, from a literary perspective, of the fate
of the great ideals of justice, freedom and equality. And of the perversity
of politicians.
8. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Óscar Hijuelos
Hijuelos was born in Cuba but has lived in the United States from childhood
and wrote this Pulitzer-prize winning work in English. Significantly, it is
a novel created from all the stereotypical features that have gone into the
construction of the image of Cubans for foreigners: their music, dancing,
passion as lovers and romantic, rebellious spirit. Although there are more
important novels written in Cuba from a literary point of view, the great
international success of The Mambo Kings and its nostalgic portrait of a
Cuba that is more dream than reality, make it a necessary player in the
field of the Cuban novel.
9. Antes que anochezca (1990), Reinaldo Arenas; Before Night Falls, trans.
Dolores M. Koch (1993)
A novel in every sense of the word, even though the raw materials are more
or less real episodes from the more or less real life of its author,
Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most intense, maudit, and visceral of Cuban
writers. Arenas wrote and published this heartrending work just before his
lonely and equally heartrending death in freezing New York. Its style,
exuberance and rage are the stuff of great fiction, as was its author.
10. El negrero (1933), Lino Novás Calvo; The Slave-trader, not translated
This novel doesn't take place in Cuba, but mainly in the slave-trading
centres on the coasts of Africa and in the boats that transported their
human cargo to the island: the Africans who have contributed so much to
Cuba's economic, cultural, religious and ethnic riches. The Slave-trader
(the story of Pedro Blanco from Málaga, one of the last slave-traders from
the middle of the 19th century) is a wonderful novel that, alongside
Faulkner's, inspired Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, the creators of
the Latin American magical-realist novel.
Translated by Peter Bush
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Mar 2009 EST