The Insatiable Spiderman [Paperback]

Pedro Juan Gutierrez (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0786716657 | ISBN-13: 978-0786716654 | Publication Date: November 23, 2005

Pedro Juan Gutierrez exploded onto the literary landscape three years ago with his bestselling novel, Dirty Havana Trilogy. Hugely acclaimed for its honest depiction of a Cuban capital characterized by sleaze, sex, poverty and hedonism, in The Insatiable Spiderman we see the return of its anti-hero, who is again prowling the streets of Havana.

Pedro Juan's relationship with his wife, Julia, is in terminal decline, and the trappings of domestic bliss hold no charms for this most restless and predatory of men. Our narrator's interests lie elsewhere: in the infinite possibilities of a chaotic Caribbean city and the chancers, artists and prostitutes who roam the streets.

In his inimitably uncompromising and exhilarating style, Pedro Juan Gutierrez again takes the reader on a journey into the underbelly of contemporary Havana—a world of easy sex, hard drinking and humorous anecdote that will be all too recognizable to the Gutierrez connoisseur.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cuban writer Gutiérrez has mined and loosely fictionalized his own life in creating Pedro Juan, a Havana writer, in two previous collections of linked vignettes, Dirty Havana Trilogy (2000) and Tropical Animal (2003). This book offers more of the same, and the formula, like the line outside of a poorly stocked Havana fish store, is wearying. Pedro Juan's adventures with various women feature a kind of modulated macho: he's not particularly interested in any of them other than physically, especially wife Julia, but he's very good at articulating his boredom and their various flaws. His travels around Cuba and his liaisons, however, continue to reveal slices of Cuban life. This time we meet a washed-up boxer touchingly devoted to his philandering wife; Pedro Juan's superstitious mother, who lives across town; an old woman who sells useless books out of her home; various lovers from various times in his life, who call or whom he runs into on the street; and many others. Heat, listlessness and varying degrees of lust are constants, and Pedro Juan's vague frustrations, this time out, become the reader's. (Feb. 27)
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From Booklist

Gutierrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy (2000) was a debauchery-drenched picaresque narrative with political overtones, and its follow-up, Tropical Animal (2003), revealed its loosely autobiographical protagonist Pedro Juan's inability to extract his lust from his native Cuba. Gutierrez's latest again finds Pedro Juan chafing against constraints on his sex-fuelled aesthetic of freedom, but this time it is not poverty and political oppression but the familiar inertia of middle age that threatens to sap his creative energy. Pedro Juan's appetites for liquor and lasciviousness have not waned, but his sexual interludes are fewer and further between, and the women he pursues are less available; anxiety permeates as it did not before. He tolerates arguments with his stolid wife, visits with his superstitious elderly mother, and the corruption of local officials with a new complacency. Like most midlife crises, such changes can be awkward to witness, as a few clumsy Hemingway references in this selection demonstrate. But this novel also exudes a fresh honesty and hints that Gutierrez may be trying to find new literary horizons. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (November 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786716657
• ISBN-13: 978-0786716654
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #712,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Misses the Cult Status Tag, November 13, 2008

By 

An admirer of Saul "Mr Wobble" (uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Insatiable Spiderman (Paperback)

'Destined to be a cult writer' says the TLS,but 'The Insatiable Spiderman' misses the bus.
Yes, it tells of the seedier side of life in Cuba, but this is mostly Gutierrez talking of his sexual conquests and desires. And like hearing anyone go on and on about their sex life-unless you're an adolescent virgin-it soon becomes tiresome and boring.
Burroughs wrote about drugs,Algren of Division Street Chicago,Wright of Black Chicago and Kerrouac of free living. All cult writers as they took you into their world and made you see things from a different perspective.
Gutierrez fails to deliver.The causes of grinding poverty,life under Castro,pathos for the people he writes of hardly exist.
A big dissapointment.