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Depraved
anti-hero returns more repulsive than ever
EMER HUGHES
The
Post. Dublin, Ireland
04/05/03 |
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HE'S BACK. Pedro Juan,
the repulsive anti-hero of Gutiérrez's first novel,
Dirty
Havana Trilogy, has moved on a few years, but little has
changed. Havana's teeming tenements are as dirt-poor as ever
broken. The tourists are still coming in their droves, to
gawk at the city's crumbling, period elegance. Everything
and everyone is for sale.
Trilogy must
be one of the most foul books in creation, a work that reeks
with the excremental stench of the semi-autobiographical depraved
existence of Gutiérrez in Havana of the mid-1990s.
"Profoundly dirty
urban realism" (which is how Gutiérrez's scatological
style is trumpeted by his publishers, Faber & Faber) is
served up again in this book- in more moderate, bite-sized
portions, but heavily indigestible nonetheless.
Tropical Animal
centres on Gutiérrez's involvement with two women.
Like the environments they come from, both couldn't be more
different. There's Gloria in Havana, a wiry, passionate, articulate
mulatta who sells her body to feed her kids. Across the Atlantic,
in Stockholm, Agneta is a lonely, soft-spoken 44-year-old
office worker who enlivens her dull existence by having long,
sexually charged phone conversations with Gutiérrez
(whom she contacts after reading Trilogy).
Describing his life in
Cuba as "a perpetual oscillation between nothing and
nothing", Gutiérrez decides to take Agneta up on the
offer to stay in her apartment in Sweden for three months.
His experiences in that "slow, grey, monotonous"
country are in stark counterpoint to the multi-ethnic madness
of life in Havana, where social conventions among the inhabitants
of the city's slums have descended into chaos.
In this second novel,
we meet a much tamer Gutiérrez, a man who is living on his
memories. Now 50 years old, he is beginning to feel his mortality,
although, as we are constantly reminded, the advancing years
have little effect on his sexual voraciousness.
But deep within this
depraved human being is a need for cohesion and clarity. He
knows that his anarchic existence must be restrained. If not,
the internal madness and external mayhem will overwhelm him.
Having consulted the local spirit mediums, `santeras', in
Havana, he believes that his multiple personality is being
dominated by spirits and entities. “Inside me I have
a devil, a vampire, a son of a bitch, a black African, an
Indian saint, a woman, a wild animal, a madman, a de-stroyer,
a visionary," he tells Gloria, who confuses him even
more by goading his wild animal while she searches for his
saint.
The choice Gutiérrez
is presented with is stark - settle down with the calm, sweet-natured,
predictable Agneta in an eerily quiet suburb of Stockholm,
or fling himself into a life of uncertainty and erotically-inspired
insanity with Gloria, who refuses to renounce her profession,
but is willing to offer him her soul.
Agneta and Gloria be-come
research objects for two novels that Gutiérrez claims he is
going to write, dedicated to each woman. He uses the rather
tedious literary device of having his protagonist discuss
his writing with his two lovers, so that what we are reading
is an account of a conversation about the novel that we are
actually reading.
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One
of the themes of the book is the impossible task of
creating art that accurately reflects life. Via his
alter ago, Gutiérrez attempts to describe the
creative torment that accompanies any kind of truthful
literary mirroring. A novel, he says, isn't written
with the brain or the hands.
"You have to be willing to flay
yourself. You strip off your skin until you're raw meat,
and then throw yourself headlong into the novel until
you hit the bottom of the precipice. Smashing yourself,
skinning yourself, and breaking your bones against the
rocks. It's the only way. He who doesn't dare to do
it this way is better off leaving his paper and pencils
on the table and dedicating himself to selling tomatoes
or real estate." |
The problem with this
theory is that, although the reader gets spattered with blood
and gristle, there is a strong sense of removal from the self-flagellating
author, crawling in the mire at the bottom of the literary
pit.
Reading a Gutiérrez novel
is often a deeply uncomfortable experience, lightened by the
occasional moment of cartoon humour. On the whole, there is
little transformative power in his writing. Like the stark,
manipulative language of porn, its graphic intensity is briefly
stimulating, but ultimately empty.
This book's publishers
make grandiose comparisons between Gutiérrez's torrid prose
and that of Miller and Bukowski. But vast chunks of this soulless
novel could be transposed onto the most lurid amateur porn
site. It's all here - sado-masochism, bestiality, onanism,
sodomy, paedophilia.
Gutiérrez
focuses much of his energy on depicting snapshots of human
behaviour that is so depraved, its effect is to numb rather
than shock.
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