Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Griity look at modern Cuba,
This review is from: Dirty Havana Trilogy (Hardcover)
Following the collapse of the silver spoon better known as the Soviet Union, Castro decided to "reform" the Cuban economy in the early nineties. However, the slight change in what a local can own and sell has little effect on the disenfranchised intellectual community. As an idealistic youth, Pedro Juan expected to become a great writer, but by early 1993, he can no longer deal with journalist reports that treat everyone as if they are morons. He quits his day job and becomes a Communist entrepreneur selling anything and everything including his body. At time he crosses the economic legal line and lands in jail. As he becomes more depravingly self-centered, Pedro Juan seeks wine, women, and weed with no hope for more than a bleak decaying future even with the beautiful Caribbean just outside his reach. DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY is a gritty, at times deliberately written in poor taste, series of grimy vignettes loosely tied together through the main character. The story line is not for the faint of heart as Pedro Juan Gutierrez paints a grim, gray look at modern Cuban society. Readers will loathe and sympathize over the downward spiral of the antihero, who compensates from a lack of mental activities with many me-me physical pursuits. Bluntly, Pedro Juan is a racist, sexist person, who deserves no empathy, yet manages to garner plenty from the audience. This novel is quite graphic sexually. It is also a no holds look at a decaying society that Pedro Juan symbolizes in every way possible, spiraling into depravity. This well-written quasi-autobiography will either bring adoring fans to the author or condemnation for bad taste without counting how Fidel will react. Harriet Klausner
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disgusting, Fascinating and Sad,
By Prudencio Montesino (los angeles, ca USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dirty Havana Trilogy (Hardcover)
A must-read for would-be visitors to Cuba! As a cuban-american and lifelong student of Cuban history I was mezmerized by this down and dirty account of life in modern day Cuba. The graphic descriptions of sex and survival are not for the squeamish. Pedro Juan captures the hopelessness and despair that drive so many young cubans to risk their lives on rickety rafts. This "Dirty Havana Trilogy" assaults your senses but won't let you put it down.
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A depraved life under a depraved system,
By
This review is from: Dirty Havana Trilogy (Hardcover)
Gutierrez is a more honest Henry Miller--he reveals the rotten, despairing philosophical underpinnings of his sexual behaviour. Unlike Miller, who tried to justify his actions, Gutierrez is brutally honest about himself. The settings and events are often sordid and disgusting, but the narrator himself is a higher being, a refined sensibility still capable of acknowledging the truth about the actions to which he is driven. The Dirty Havana Trilogy also recalls "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but the ultra low-budget sewer that is Castro's Cuba makes the Communist Czechoslavkia of Milan Kundera's time look like Donald Trump's New York.Clearly, this is not a book for those who are easily offended. There is lots of meaningless death, meaningless sex, casually pejorative slurs on people of colour and women, descriptions of filthy and disgusting environments. But, notwithstanding the blurbs on the dust jacket of the book, Gutierrez's work is a very moral work in the sense that any reader will clearly see the cost of such behaviour and be unlikely to imitate the narrator. It would be fascinating to systematically compare this book, with its indictment of the moral choices remaining to the ordinary person living under Casto's government, to Armando Valladares' "Against all Hope", which is also available on Amazon.com, of course. This is another interesting addition to the "lying in the gutter and looking at the stars" genre. Highly recommended for those who are up for it.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 9 books citing this book
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
|
|
