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Communicate, contaminate and keep moving
Miranda France reviews The Insatiable
Spider Man by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
MIRANDA FRANCE
Telegraph,
London, United Kingdom
13/03/2005 |
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"I LOOKED for
the dullest and most vulgar women in my neighbourhood. I
liked to hit them when I'd given them a good shafting, and
they got angry at my sadism. Perhaps that's what saved me:
the drunken bouts, the women, letting out my rage, throwing
everything in the shit, not expecting anything from anyone.
And writing. In the mornings, drunk, I wrote short stories
about everything that was happening to me. And I kept going.
And here I am."
Many of the passages
are even less palatable than that. Far from pulling his
punches, Gutiérrez throws all his weight into them.
The result is mesmerising, furious and poetic prose. There
is no plot in The Insatiable Spider Man; instead,
the novel offers a string of scenes ("vignettes"
is too dainty a word here) from Pedro Juan's Havana life.
He drinks coffee, paints, argues with his wife, masturbates,
trawls the city for food and has a lot of sex.
Life at home, meanwhile,
is miserable and embittered. Pedro Juan's wife is a microbiologist,
but can earn marginally more in a pizzeria: it still amounts
to only $25 a month. He writes (the stuff that we're reading?)
but the couple are consumed by the perpetual hunt for food,
especially for protein. So we see them boiling up a cow's
head, or eating meat that is going bad, disgusted by their
own circumstances. "Marriage destroys everything,"
observes Pedro Juan. "Or I destroy everything. I don't
know."
There are striking similarities with the dirty realism of
Raymond Carver. Gutiérrez's creations seem
to have no sense of solidarity, or hope for the future
- on the contrary, they revile one another. Pedro
Juan is disgusted by people who are too fat, or sweaty,
or slow. He is conscious of rats, cockroaches, of
the putrefaction all around him; and he dreams of
death and putrefaction too. He has a neurotic fear
of being "contaminated" by the misery and
negativity of others. |
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Then there is Pedro
Juan's penis, which is almost a character in its own right.
It drives him, turbo-powered, around Havana, looking for
women he can "stick it into".
It sounds mightily
depressing, but The Insatiable Spider Man is, perversely,
engrossing and sometimes exhilarating. Gutiérrez
is obviously interested in music (Brahms, Sibelius and Mahler
are mentioned here) and his writing has an understanding
of movement that is almost musical. There is never a stilted
transition, or clunky line. John King's excellent translation
must be credited, too.
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Title: The
Insatiable Spider Man
Author: Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
tr by John King Publisher
163pp, Faber
& Faber, £6.99 (pbk)
ISBN: 0571221610
In Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's
much-praised Dirty
Havana Trilogy, the antihero decided that he had
three options in life: "I could either toughen
up, go crazy or commit suicide." He settled on
the first of these three. This sequel finds him still
acting as tough as hell - but you get the impression
that suicide or craziness remain options.
The protagonist, Pedro
Juan, shares his creator's name, age, baldness, profession
and hobby (painting),
so it seems fair to describe this work as semi-autobiographical.
In the first chapter of this new novel, he explains
how a bad episode in his life sparked a writing career: |
The same themes - sex,
money, oppression - are handed on through the chapters like
the kind of contagions Pedro Juan worries obsessively about.
The characters communicate, contaminate and keep moving.
The criticism of Castro's Cuba is understated effectively
- the languid and effortless demolition of the communist
ideal makes the pro-Castro literature I have read recently
seem brittle and hollow.
In the sometimes excessively
flowery world of Latin American literature, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's
voice is sharp and distinct. I just hope that in real life
he's nicer to his wife.
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