”I would love to find out it was Hemingway who killed that guy. That bastard has been getting up my nose for years. But it pisses me off to think they”I would love to find out it was Hemingway who killed that guy. That bastard has been getting up my nose for years. But it pisses me off to think they might land him with a murder he didn’t commit. That’s why I’m going to look into it…”
Mario Conde retired from the police force to become a writer. When the call comes in from some friends still on the force to help investigate a 40 year old murder, Conde takes one look at the snow white sheet of paper in his “prehistoric Underwood typewriter” and leaps at the chance.
To make things even more interesting, an FBI badge is found with the skeletal remains of the body. This creates all kinds of complications. What would an FBI agent be doing in Cuba, where he has no jurisdictional authority? Who shot him twice with a shotgun at close range? Why?
Conde has a complicated relationship with Hemingway. While he revered him in his youth, he loathes him in his maturity. His true feelings continue to vacillate between those two polarizing sentiments. ”Conde felt a strange unease. All his prejudices and his desire to prove Hemingway’s guilt had fallen into a lake of his memory and he now watched them sinking dramatically, in the face of his disconcerting realisation that his hatred was not as strong as his archaic sense of justice.”
My own relationship with Hemingway matches almost the same trajectory as Conde’s. For me there always lingers a certain amount of loyalty to a writer whom I once revered. Even if I’ve moved on to other writers who better fit my theory of writing I can not condemn Hemingway either. For the most part I sidestep the Hemingway issue. I’ve tried reading him in recent years and the spark that I first enjoyed about his writing has dampened to the point that reading him is painful. His influence on literature is undeniable. I would make the case that his influence swung too big a stick.
What makes this book fascinating is that Leonardo Padura Fuentes effortlessly slides us between the mind of Ernest Hemingway in October of 1958 back to the present with Conde’s investigation. We see events unfold in the past side by side with Conde’s meticulous gathering of the dusty and sometimes distorted clues that will lead him to the truth.
His gut is already telling him the truth, but Conde knows the feeling in his gut won’t close this case. I’ve rode side saddle with Conde on five cases now. I’ve wrapped his arm around my shoulders and walked him home when he had one, two...or four too many glasses of rum. I’ve read his pieces of fiction dripping with squalor and sentimentality. I’ve seen him fall in love too quickly. What makes us brothers for life is how he feels about books.
”Although the business was not that profitable, Conde liked the job for its peculiar advantages; he enjoyed the personal stories concealed behind the decision to get rid of a library that might have been built up over three or four generations, and he liked the time lapse between purchase and sale, during which he could read anything he liked as it passed through his hands. The essential drawback of the business operation, however, was evident when Conde suffered small cuts to his skin when he handled good old books damaged, at times irreparably, by carelessness and ignorance or when, instead of taking certain tempting volumes to his friend’s bookstall, he decided to keep them in his own bookcase, an incurable symptom of the terrible infirmity of bibliophilia.”
Conde might be solving an old case, but he is also coming to terms with his feelings about Hemingway. ”The Vigia house had always been a kind of stage, a backdrop, made to fit the character more than the man. Conde found it all highly offensive---the thousands of books and tens of paintings and drawings placed in bitter competition with rifles, bullets, spears, and knives, and the motionless, accusing heads of some of the victims of Hemingway’s acts of manliness, his hunting trophies, collected simply for the pleasure of killing, for the contrived sensation of living dangerously.”
Conde can’t deny the positive influence that Hemingway had on his life. In fact, when he first read Hemingway, this was the first time he had thoughts of being a writer. Did Hemingway curse him or did he throw him a lifeline?
The Cuban Missile Crisis is, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, the closest we have come to World War Three. The citizens in America and Russia were not the only nervous people; the whole world was nervous. The struggle for power, as history has shown, never contains itself just to the principles involved. It bleeds into every corner of the world, or in this case, the radioactive fallout drifts where the wind will take it. The Russian President Khrushchev was convinced he could intimidate the young, brash American President Kennedy.
Well, if you know your history, you know who...blinks.
When Kennedy turns to his aide and asks him for those speeches given by Wilson and Roosevelt, even though I know he never uses that speech, it still sends chills down my spine because it really shows how close the world came to being annihilated.
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John Forsythe plays Michael Nordstrom in the 1969 movie.
This story begins with the defection of Boris Kuznetov, a highly placed Russian official who learns he is about to be executed, but instead of placidly accepting his fate he approaches Michael Nordstrom, an American intelligence officer, with an offer of information for his life and the lives of his family. Once in America he will only talk to the French intelligence officer Andre Devereaux.
Kutznetov reveals that there is an operation called Topaz, involving highly placed KGB agents in the French intelligence community. What I didn’t know is that Topaz is based on the true events involving the Martel Affair, or more interestingly referred to as the Sapphire Affair.
This is a steaming pile of radioactive information to have land on Devereaux’s plate, but the Americans need him to do something else for them. He needs to go to Cuba and confirm that those shapes in the U2 overflight pictures are truly what they think they are. Andre is French, and he can just say no, but there is a Little Dove in Cuba whom he would like to see by the name of Juanita de Cordoba, whose husband was a hero of the revolution.
Getting into Cuba is not a problem. Getting out of Cuba with the information about the missiles turns out to be extremely difficult.
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Frederick Stafford is Andre Devereaux in the movie version of Topaz.
Let’s make a quick list of Andre’s problems.
1) He might end up in one of the many, many prisons that have been created since the revolution in Cuba. Viva la revolucion! Well, for some. The problem with most revolutions is that the ones who kicked the bastards out become the new bastards.
2) Rico Parra, a powerful Cuban official, wants The Little Dove for himself. He is pathological in his desire to possess her.
3) Andre’s wife, Nicole, leaves him and moves back to France because he doesn’t pay enough attention to her in Washington DC.
4) President Pierre La Croix doesn’t trust the Americans and doesn’t trust Andre because Devereaux believes that France’s future has to be tied to America. La Croix has Napoleonic visions of where he believes France’s future lies.
5) Who can he trust? There are highly placed KGB moles in his own government. Those same people will most certainly want him dead or discredited or, better yet, both.
6) Andre’s daughter is involved with a writer who has tweaked the noses of the wrong people with his incendiary writing. Telling the truth to a near dictator like La Croix is never safe.
7) Andre has narcolepsy, which when he is really tired or stressed can be temporarily disabling. It is a harbinger of more health issues on the horizon.
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The Hitchcock cameo...can you spot his rotundness?
It is no wonder that Alfred Hitchcock decides to make a movie of the book. He stays reasonably faithful to most of the part of the book set in the 1960s. Leon Uris actually helped with the script, but he and Alfred butt heads over the character development of the villains in the story, and another writer, more conducive to Hitchcock’s ideas, is found. In the later part of the book, Uris devotes some time writing prologues about Devereaux’s adventures during WW2. This gives the reader some background, not only on Devereaux, but also the people he is most closely associated with. The very people who now are the top suspects to be the KGB moles in his government.
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Dany Robin plays Nicole Devereaux in the movie.
This is really an intriguing piece of Cold War writing with a convoluted series of plots that kept me puzzling over potential outcomes. The only misstep that dates the book is some statements made by Andre’s wife, Nicole, about how she should have given herself over to her husband. I read them out loud to my wife hoping she would see the logic, but all I received was a series of eye rolls and complaints about feeling nauseous. Like most people, Nicole does want her spouse to conform to her vision of what she wants him to be--someone powerful, but less involved in the day to day activities of keeping the world safe for democracy. I actually thought that Uris does a reasonably good job presenting a balanced view of her, but some of those statements she makes later in the book doesn’t ring true.
With all this extra background, now I’m off to rewatch the movie. It was a commercial bomb and did not resonate with audiences. I have a feeling that I will watch it with different eyes this time.
****Check out the Netflix original series Four Seasons in Havana based on Leonardo Padura's books****
”That wind brought to the surface the black sands****Check out the Netflix original series Four Seasons in Havana based on Leonardo Padura's books****
”That wind brought to the surface the black sands and detritus in his memory, brittle leaves of dead loves and bitter odours of guilt, with an intensity more perverse than forty days in the desert. Fuck the wind, he muttered, resolving not to wallow further in this melancholy, because he knew the antidote--a bottle of rum and a woman, the more whorish the better---was the perfect, instant cure for a depression that couldn’t decide whether it was located in his soul or in his skin.”
Lieutenant Mario “The Count” Conde is one of the best detectives in Havana, but he doesn’t want to be a detective. He wants to be a writer. He wants to write like Hemingway in the same way I want to be a Kennedy.
I wanna be a Kennedy I wanna be a big heartbreaker Live fast and for real And you can follow it in the papers
I wanna be a Kennedy I wanna shake hands with heroes And kiss the girls of centerfolds on the tongue And die young
I can’t think of Cuba without thinking about JFK, but I must confess I don’t really want to be a Kennedy. They tend to DIE TOO YOUNG, and I have TOO MANY books to read. I’ve been listening to a lot of music recently, and Kill Hannah has somehow just bled into this review.
The Count hasn’t had a good romp in the hay for way too long.
He drinks.
He masturbates.
Unfortunately, rum and a good rub only tide him over until he catches the scent of a beautiful woman. Then he is back to feeling unfulfilled, unloved, unneeded, and still desperately trying to find a few precious hours to.... ”Write whatever. Just write.”
He catches a murder case. It has a bit of everything: ”sex, violence, drugs, crime, alcohol, fraud, currency swindles, black-marketing, sexual favours and just deserts.” A teacher has been strangled to death, a pretty little thing, barely older than the students she is teaching.
It is alarming that a teacher has been murdered, but what is more shocking is that a stub of a joint is floating in the toilet.
My life was empty, forever on a down Until you took me, showed me around My life is free now, my life is clear I love you sweet leaf, though you can't hear
Come on now, try it out
Living in a country that has been overrun by meth, crank, crack, and now due to all the rampant Oxycontin addictions (Thank you Big Pharma), we are back to having heroin issues.
Purple Haze
Finding a joint at a scene here is like finding a rank baby diaper, unpleasant because it has to be dealt with, but otherwise not of much interest. In Cuba, finding Marijuana at a crime scene is a big deal. Their reactions were similar to what you might see in an old 1950s cop show, but then their thinking, like their cars, has been suspended in that era.
The plot is secondary to Conde’s plight with his libido. He has met a woman, not just any woman, a saxophone player, a redhead with curves so wild that not even James Dean could have navigated them safely: ”warm, wild tits, with ripe plum nipples that stir anxiously at the first flickering touch of his reptilian tongue, and, a baby again, he sucks, starting a journey to the origins of life and the world.”
It would be easy to peg Conde as an oversexed, aging man ensnared in one long mid-life crisis, but what sort of saves him for me is that he is such a romantic. He dreams of being with that one woman who will not only fulfill all of his sexual fantasies, but one who will also bring stability, grace, and purpose back to his life. He is such a lost and tortured literary soul that for those of us who struggle to be who we are supposed to be can certainly identify with his fear that he will never get the chance to take what he feels and release it into words.
The other night I watched Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show Parts Unknown which was set that week in Cuba. This was good timing because I’ve been thinking more and more about when I will make the trip myself... hopefully before things change too much. This is not nearly as exciting a prospect now as it would have been if I’d figured out how to go when it was frowned upon. I almost fell out of my chair when Bourdain had lunch with none other than Leonardo Padura. On the next commercial I ran downstairs to my library and looked to see if I still had some Padura’s I hadn’t read. Bitter Lemon Press, a few years ago, started publishing NOIR crime from around the world. Padura was one of their featured writers. This is the second book in the series, but because they published them out of order, I actually ended up reading it fourth. I would suggest starting with the first one, Havana Blue.
Padura, in the interview with Bourdain, said he would never leave Cuba. He didn’t have to tell me. It is splashed all over his books. He loves his country. He wants it to evolve into a better balanced combination of the old and the new. As American money flows into that country and real estate starts to skyrocket, it will be interesting if enough of the old can be saved to keep that city looking like the charming Havana that, due to political differences, has been kept cocooned in Cold War mothballs.
"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitf"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else" Italo Clavino, Invisible Cities
***Just a word of warning there will be mature content in this review due to the explicit content of this novel.***
This novel is a series of short vignettes that are roughly in chronological order. The book is raw, focusing on the poorest of the poor of Havana. It is 1993 and Castro has just allowed his people to trade legally in US dollars and opened up the market to free enterprise. People can now own their own businesses as long as those businesses do not compete with the state. It is a society short on goods and services, very few working opportunities, and the crushing boredom of too much time and too little diversion, people are walking on the thin edge of survival every day.
The main character is Pedro Juan a man who once was a celebrity radio reporter. It is never really explained what he did, murky details, but he stepped on some toes and was fired. We meet him at one of the many low points in his life. As the book evolves it will become harder and harder to pinpoint the true low points. The book is loosely based on the real exploits of the author Pedro Juan Gutierrez.
"So there I was, staring out at the Caribbean, with no idea what the fuck I could do to make a few pesos. Yep, that is pretty much Pedro Juan's circumstances every day. He gets jobs as a garbageman, street sweeper, and slaughterhouse worker to name a few, but none of them pay very well and within short order he finds a reason to quit or provides them with a reason to fire him. He only takes a job out of desperation when his black market scheming quits bearing fruit or he can't find a woman to make money for him.
Havana is crumbling. The infrastructure is on life support. Bathrooms don't work, and there is no one to fix them. Grand old mansions have been turned into apartment buildings sometimes holding 400 people. The building that Pedro Juan is squatting in has an ebb and flow to it. People coming from the country, people going to jail, and people finding temporary salvation living off a foreigner keep the building occupant numbers in flux.
There is this point in the novel that for me really showed the decrepitude of the circumstances that people are reduced to. Pedro Juan is standing in line to use a bathroom on the rooftop of his building. The bathroom doesn't work and a mound of crap is slowly advancing into the room. Pedro Juan decides he can't wait any longer he craps into a piece of paper, wads it up and throws his offering onto the rooftop of the building next door. Okay maybe I have been a member of the middle class too long, but I would do any work, whatever was available, to avoid finding myself in circumstances where I am taking a crap in front of my neighbors into a piece of paper and tossing that wad like a bomb onto a neighboring building. There are people that may be there because they have no other options, but Pedro Juan has choices. He is educated and capable, but being FREE is more important.
Pedro Juan has his own theories about the horrors of being middle class. "The middle class never knows what's what. That's why they're always scared and want to be told what's wrong. They think everything's deviant behavior. It must be terrible to middle class and judge everything from a distance like that, never trying anything out for yourself." The great thing about squalor is that I don't have to live it to experience it. I can sit in my arm chair and pick up a book and spend a day in the slums of Havana or New Delhi or Detroit. I don't feel the need to experience poverty first hand.
When I was going to college there was many times when the gas gauge of my car was setting on empty, that blaring amber round light burning a hole into my retina. Many times I found myself with two thin dimes in my pocket and a bit hazy on the last time I had eaten. I brushed up against poverty and in no way am I making a case that I experienced any true hardship, but those brief moments of uncertainty made me realize that I was going to do everything I could to not find myself in such circumstances again.
Pedro Juan believes that living in poverty equals true freedom. Every day is a struggle to eat and afford the lifeblood of Cuba...RUM, but with no securities and no dependents he feels as free as a human being can. He has naught to lose and very little to gain. "I had nothing to do. Nothing urgent, at least. In the long term, there are always prospects, hope, the future, everything soon to be better, God our savior. But that's all always in the long term. Just now, this minute, there's nothing."
The problem with his theory is that he is most successful when he is living off of a woman. To maintain his freedom he must subjugate another. When he finds his pockets empty and his stomach growling he sends his girlfriend out to patrol the streets looking for a foreigner to screw so he can eat. He, for lack of a better term, is a pimp, a lazy pimp at that. He doesn't walk the streets providing protection for her he just lays around the apartment waiting for her to return so he can spend her money. When one woman gets smart, or finds a better position and leaves him he simply finds another.
Sex dominates the book, drips into every vignette some way or another. Pedro Juan is obsessed not only with sex, but with his Long Tom or his preferred term prick. "I have a beautiful prick, broad, dark, six inches long, with a pink, throbbing head and lots of hair. The truth is, I like my own prick, balls and pubes too. It's a sinewy, luscious, hard prick." Later in the book he is describing his package again and miracle of miracles it seems to have grown. "And I showed her my prick, eight inches of steel, thick and veined and angled to the left. If you do decide to read this book you will be subjugate to many descriptions of Pedro Juan's one-eyed wonder weasel. You will also experience his constant desire for sex. His range seems to be anyone, regardless of shape or size, who is female between the ages of 71 and 20. He may not have standards, but he does have preferences. He prefers mulattoes with large rear ends and grand tetons for breasts.
I have read and enjoyed Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jean Genet so I don't think of myself as prudish, but as I worked my way through these stories the obsession with sexual conquests and the ready complicity of all the females started to become wearisome. With very little effort he seems to convince these women to have sex with him. There is one point where he hands a woman a plate of food at his house and becomes angry shortly there after because she refuses to have sex with him. He is so used to having it all come so easily that he is outraged over any resistance.
The author has to keep reminding me that Pedro Juan is 45 because his actions, from his obsession with sexual conquest to his avoidance of any responsibility, keep me thinking he is in his early twenties. The author also in his forties when he wrote this book seems to be proud of the fact that he still has the same desires as a much younger man.
It isn't a novel that you want to sit down and read straight through. The stories start to feel repetitive. I found that the book worked better for me when I would read a few vignettes and then set it aside to read something else. I picked this book up because I really enjoy Leonardo Padura Fuentes. His noir color series about Lieutenant Mario Conde brim with sensuality and his eye for detail make me feel like I'm there and want to be there. His first book in the series Havana Red won The Cafe De Gijon Prize, The Novela Negra Prize and The Hammett Prize. If you want a subtler, but still rich with detail, introduction to Cuban culture that would be my recommendation....more
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