8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No cigar, May 12, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Havana Twist: A Willa Jansson Mystery (Hardcover)
Written in the first person, at times "Havana Twist" reads more like an armchair travel book than a mystery novel. The Willa Jansson character is no ass-kicking feminist detective. Instead she leaves the hard work to her cop ex-boyfriend. He tries to solve the case while she worries about what to wear and if she'll get back together with him. When a man is shot dead beside her, she worries about a pinpoint powder burn on her thumb.
It paints the usual doom and gloom picture of Cuba, which I found to be extremely exaggerated (Are there really no dogs in Cuba??). I can only assume this was either for fictional impact or for political reasons; either way, this is not a book that anyone with a regard for accuracy will enjoy. There is certainly no attempt to balance or justify the constant depiction of Cuba as a sinister country, filled with paranoia and corruption, where you can trust no one. In fact the evil Chinese military and Hispanic villains lend the book racist undertones.
I found the style a bit self-conscious and culturally specific. Her cultural reference points were solidly two decades behind (an Andy Gibb look-alike??!!) and her new-age yuppie lifestyle does not contrast well with an attempt at a gritty third-world murder story.
To the book's credit, I did make it through to the end (although the plot was so tedious and cumbersome that I lost interest several times). It is constructed like the recollection of a bad dream, which makes the whole book lack believability. The book has its characters suddenly coming across deserted tunnels, meeting dark mysterious figures, suffering from mother anxiety, falling down shafts, running for airplanes.... Freud would have a field day. As the supporting characters are murdered around her, our heroine shows little remorse. I was waiting for a twist like the title suggested but it never came.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Confused local color, November 16, 1999
By A Customer
Havana Twist is one of those mysteries that drenches itself in local color. Unfortunately, Matera finds herself drenched in fatal, often hilarious mistakes.
The book reads strongly as if she's admirably decided to abide by U.S. travel regulations and never visited Cuba, choosing instead to research though books. Havana Twist contains a bewildering array of contradictory descriptions seemingly taken from different periods of recent Cuban history.
That might not matter except that she makes her descriptions of Cuba and her character's paranoia in the atmosphere there central to the development of the plot.
She describes the action as occurring perhaps a decade after the start of Castro's final hour; a period that started in about 1988-89, putting the book firmly in the present.
Astonishingly, laughably, she describes Cubans fleeing from tourists. Since I started (legally) visiting Cuba in about 1992, tourists have been swarmed by Cubans.
She depicts Chinese soldiers lurking everywhere. In about 18 trips over the past few years, I've never heard that, nor have I heard dissidents or diplomats mention such a thing.
She portrays a Cuba of empty, darkened streets, bereft of gasoline. That would have been true in about 1992-94. But in the past few years, anybody has been able to buy gasoline, the streets are even sometimes clogged, and power outages have sharply dimished.
She has Willa Jansson, who must be a pitiful attorney, think that by paying a hotel in Mexican pesos she is avoiding U.S. spending restrictions. She might check Treasury on that.
She seems to think the plastic bodied Moskvich is the principle form of automotive transport. Bizarre. There are a few metal-bodied version of that car around but the Russian Lada is vastly more prevalent and is probably now outnumbered by Japanese cars, Fiats and Peugeots. I've never heard of anybody renting a Moskvich, as she has characters do. And did she ever see sparking lights on Cubana flights? The airline tends to use modern planes chartered from European companies.
She has American journalists unable to get visas. Mainstream U.S. reporters have visited routinely, on cuban granted journalists visas, for many years now. Not everybody can get in, but the wire agencies she describes surely can. Check for havana datelines in databases.
By the way, how did Jansson's boyfriend carry a gun through U.S. and Mexican airport searches?
I've been flying out of Mexico for years and haven't noticed any charred Cubana planes lately.
There are more than 1 million tourists -- the largest number from Canada and many from the United States -- visiting each year. Jansson's fear of standing out as a tourist -- in HAVANA? -- is hilarous.
I could go on, and on, and on.
If she's going to use local paranoia and atmosphere as plot elements, they ought to seem credible.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sorry, A. Reader, January 1, 2000
"A. Reader"'s comments, and those of some others here, have made me want to read some of Lia Matera's other books. Surely they must be better than Havana Twist, whose writing is pedestrian at best (the description of the Havana waterfront and other landmarks I'm familiar with are spectacularly leaden and dull, and the characterization was unrealistic at best: what a bunch of bozos, legally speaking, her protagonists were), to inspire such unthinking loyalty.
While Mr. or Ms. "Reader" assures us she or he knows Cuba by drifting away from the tourist zones and can vouch for Matera (despite the efforts of sinister taxi drivers), I've visited Cuba about 20 times over the past seven years and have spent more time with open and avowed dissidents than "A. Reader" has spent altogether in Cuba. The statements referring to me by name, impugning my motives on easily provable false grounds, and posted anonymously, might be considered libelous in some contexts, if anybody was infantile enough to give them credence.
My failure to describe Matera's undescriptive description of Mexico City -- and its laws -- where I've lived for a decade -- was due to my intent not to bore potential readers.
I did very much like Martin Cruz Smith's Cuba-based mystery -- which was no more favorable to Cuba, and somewhat outdated, but vastly better written -- and recommend that anybody purchase it from Amazon.
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