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Our man in Havana
The Insatiable Spiderman by Pedro
Juan Gutiérrez trans John King
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CUBA IS famous for rum, cigars, dancing,
classic cars and sex. Pedro
Juan Gutiérrez' literary prowl through the
streets of Havana contains just about all of these.
Here, his drunken, hustling anti-hero, at 50, is a little
older than in Dirty
Havana Trilogy, the first novel in the series, but
he is no less partial to a few shots of cheap rum and
a spot of sweaty nymphomania.
In Pedro
Juan's world, sex is everywhere: hard, cruel, bleary-eyed,
dangerous sex (this book starts with a rape scene).
There are orgies in the park, there's masturbation on
the roof, there are prostitutes on corners and steamy
quickies against the Malecón (Havana's famous
sea-wall). Gutiérrez, it seems, has an inexhaustible
supply of salacious scenarios and outrageous characters,
and he flashes them before our eyes with such churning
speed that it's difficult to digest. |
His
female characters are fiery yet compliant, written with
a perplexing mix of compassion and chauvinism. Amid this
great sexual spectacle, Pedro Juan plays the insatiable
stud, the lovable rogue, fraying at the edges and wielding
a whip. There's much more to this than an illustration of
stereotypes around the ostracised and eccentric island of
Cuba. Gutiérrez does play lavishly on the world's
fascination with his country, but he gives us considerably
more than what we bargained for. Pedro Juan and his fellow
Cubans are dirt poor. They're living in filthy rooms in
decaying buildings, in houses infested with roaches, and
surviving on rice and beans. Everyone's a hustler. An old
woman sells books for a few pesos, younger women sell their
bodies to get by, and Pedro Juan, an ex-journalist, sometimes
sells lobsters. There is an eternal search for food, for
protein, for chicken that hasn't gone off.
With
blatant honesty, Gutiérrez thrusts the ugliness of
poverty into full view. Sex becomes a kind of antidote to
hunger, and Pedro Juan relies on it to fend off a spiritual
death that he senses lurking at the pinnacle of a life of
struggle.
He
writes with an unruly, nonchalant hand and goes out of his
way neither to impress nor to protect the more faint-hearted
of readers. At the same time, Pedro Juan is not without
a softer side, and this is what brings balance to a text
that might otherwise be unbearable for its crudeness and
cynicism. There are exquisite moments in these pages, gentle
epiphanies amid the Havana ruins and stench. He expresses
a deep love of the Malecón and the sea, where he
likes to fish. The writing is thick with atmosphere and
fiercely vivid; underpinning everything is a wry and irresistible
humour. Pedro Juan is a multi-layered narrator, which means
that his text has many, often conflicting, levels of impact.
In
the expected next instalment, one hopes Gutiérrez
might linger a little longer on his characters and their
ludicrous stories. The
Insatiable Spiderman, like its predecessor, is a dizzying
spree of vignettes, many of which could turn into novels
on their own. With such charisma in his pen, and such juicy
raw material at his disposal, Gutiérrez has the potential
to hold our attention for many more wildly indecent prowls.
Diana Evans's novel '26a' is published
next month by Chatto & Windus
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