Thomas Sanchez, the author of the Key West novel Mile Zero (“A comic masterpiece bursting with vital characters, its brilliantly contrived plot uncoils with the suspense of a thriller.” —New York Times), returns to the tropics with King Bongo, a fevered dream of dangerous desires and political treachery amid the glamour, intrigue and corruption of 1950s Havana.
On New Year’s Eve 1957, a terrorist bomb rips through Havana’s famous Tropicana nightclub. King Bongo, a rogue Cuban American, tortured by a mysterious past and possessed of a mythic musical talent, goes on the hunt for the culprits, and for his sister, known as the Panther, Cuba’s most exotic showgirl, who disappeared in the explosion.
Navigating Havana’s maze of colonial backstreets, red-light districts, Chinatown alleys, swank country clubs and opulent casinos, Bongo becomes ensnared by other complicated and outrageous lives—American hit men plotting a political assassination, decadent movie stars trolling with their bait of teenage mistresses, prophetic shoeshine boys and hotel maids willing to sacrifice their lives for the right social cause; a beautiful American socialite weaving a web of erotic intrigue—and, more dangerously, by Humberto Zapata, a sinister Machiavellian secret police operative, with whom Bongo will have a final explosive showdown.
Thomas Sanchez reimagines a world of lush sensuality where Cuban and American cultures collide in a riveting novel of graphic power.
"We understand the economics of love," says Mrs. Armstrong, a sexy American socialite residing in Cuba. "To really sell a torch song, you've got to be willing to light yourself on fire." Like her, an entire gallery of wonderfully eccentric characters seems ready to go up in flames in this flamboyant noir epic by Sanchez (Mile Zero; Zoot-Suit Murders). It is 1957 in Havana, and glamorous, ambitious young insurance agent King Bongo ("he was a little man, but he had a big plan") is primed to sell a major policy to the owner of the legendary Tropicana nightclub. On New Year's Eve, he heads for the club, where his sister-the island's most glittery showgirl, known as the Panther-is performing. But before Bongo can do his business, a bomb goes off in front of the stage, and in the havoc the Panther disappears. To find her, Bongo must travel from colonial country clubs to squalid alleyways, challenged by sinister rivals like the nefarious Humberto Zapata, an official in the island's secret police force, and threatened by a constant undertone of seduction, violence and revolutionary stirrings. Sanchez's writing can evoke the hard-boiled masters of the past-he describes Havana's rows of houses, for example, as "old tarts posing for a group reunion shot in the glare of tropical sunlight"-though his stylings sometimes spin out of control ("Guys spilled the guts of their lies as beer foamed, whiskey flowed, rum drummed"). The occasional sloppiness aside, however, he succeeds in creating an independent world that is at once highly stylized and believable. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Thomas Sanchez is a descendant of Spanish immigrants and Portuguese cattlemen dating back five generations to the 1800s California Gold Rush. Sanchez was born in Oakland Naval Hospital in 1944, days after his father was killed in the World War II Battle of Tawara. He was raised on a rural farm in California's Santa Clara Valley.
Sanchez' first novel, RABBIT BOSS, the hundred year saga of a California Indian Tribe, was begun at the age of 20 when he worked on cattle ranches in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. RABBIT BOSS was published when Sanchez was 27 and was cited by the San Francisco Chronicle as, "one of the most important books of the 20th century," by the New York Times as "A novel of epic dimensions," by Vanity Fair as "a landmark of our literature."
Throughout the 1960s in California, Sanchez witnessed and participated in many of the eras major social and political events, the strikes of the farm workers in the Central Valley, the tumultuous U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the clashes in San Francisco between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police, the counter-culture explosion of the infamous Haight-Ashbury District.
In the 1970s Sanchez was involved in the siege of Wounded Knee in the Black Hills of South Dakota, site of the infamous massacre of Sioux Indians, where Sanchez ran strategic supplies and food to Indians trapped inside the town of Wounded Knee, which had been surrounded by armed Federal forces with shoot-to-kill orders. A partial account of this event was published by Sanchez as, THE REAL COWBOYS AND INDIANS, in a commemorative American Bi-Centennial book collection with Henry Miller, whom Sanchez knew.
Sanchez next published, ZOOTSUIT MURDERS. The novel, set in the Los Angeles barrio of World War II, explored a chaotic world of anti-Communist hysteria, bizarre religious cults, tough gangs and undercover government agents. ZOOT-SUIT MURDERS was cited by the Chicago Tribune as, "a vivid tale of political intrigue by a master of pictorial detail." Following ZOOTSUIT MURDERS Sanchez was honored with a Guggenheim Award for his writings.
In the 1980s Sanchez lived in Key West and traveled from there throughout the American tropics. He was in harm's way during the Civil Wars of Guatemala and El Salvador, where he traversed both political and physical jungle landscapes with a real life cast of characters, from guerilla fighters to defrocked renegade priests, to bible toting CIA spooks and hardbitten war journalists. Much of this made its way into Sanchez's novel, MILE ZERO, about which the Los Angeles Times stated, "Sanchez forges a new world vision rich in the cultural intertextuality of Steinbeck and Cervantes, Joyce and Shakespeare."
Throughout the 1990s Sanchez lived in Paris, Provence and Mallorca, the settings for his novel, DAY OF THE BEES, about the hidden lives of a famous Spanish painter and his French mistress, a woman transformed from an artist's muse into a heroic Resistance fighter. The esteemed newspaper Le Monde declared DAY OF THE BEES, "A literary landmark, a novel of unforgettable power about love and war, art and freedom." The French Government knighted Sanchez with the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for his body of work.
At the beginning of the 21st century Sanchez returned to the tropics for his novel, KING BONGO, set against the glamor and intrigue of pre-revolutionary 1950s Havana, where Cuban and American cultures collided with geo-political consequence. The Washington Post proclaimed the novel to be, "An exotic portrait of sex, violence, corruption and conspiracy in Cuba."
Sanchez recently wrote and directed a short dramatic film in Paris, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. In 2011 Sanchez is directing a film from his script, LOVE ME LIKE A ROCK. A documentary film based on the life of Thomas Sanchez, A FIRE OF WORDS, is being shot by Wordfire Productions in Havana, Key West, Miami, Mallorca, Paris and the Sierra Mountains of California. Sanchez' sixth novel will be published worldwide in 2011.
Book and Film Contact: Esther Newberg International Creative Management 825 Eighth Avenue, 26th Floor New York, NY 10019
5.0 out of 5 starsSteamy Noir in Old Havana..., April 28, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: King Bongo: A Novel of Havana (Hardcover)
Thomas Sanchez is back in the tropical millieu of his epic novel "Mile Zero", where a raft of odd characters love, fight, dance, and struggle, this time not in Key West, but in 1957 Havana. With revolutionaries in the hills and fading, decadent stars prowling the casinos and nightclubs of Havana, a man half American and half Cuban struggles to find his beloved sister after she disappears in a New Year's Eve bombing; he also struggles to find himself in a place rife with corruption and glitz, where the rich rule like gods and literally get away with murder, and the poor live wretched lives. It's all here in this fast-paced thriller that reads like a classic noir deepened with the same humor, wisdom and pathos that has marked Sanchez's writing since he burst out of nowhere 30 years ago with Rabbit Boss, and kept going with Zoot Suit Murders, Mile Zero, and Day of the Bees. You will love this book.
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This review is from: King Bongo: A Novel of Havana (Hardcover)
Thomas Sanchez has created in KING BONGO a post-modern legendary novel, rich and mythological. Like Graham Green in his time, Sanchez has the courage to write about how politics shaped a particular cultural moment . Don't be misled that the politics are the author's, as some will mistakenly present them to be, in the same way that Green was often misinterpreted. Sanchez did not write a revisionist history, seen from a half-century on. He wrote about high and low society and everything in between, about politics both personal and self serving, about dreams, desires and obsessions, tossing them all into the conflicted boiiling stew that was Havana in the mid-1950s. This book is for those with open minds and prepared for an unforgetable wild ride.
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5.0 out of 5 starsIncredible and enjoyable, May 17, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: King Bongo: A Novel of Havana (Hardcover)
I have read all of Thomas Sanchez's novels and have never been disappointed. You won't be disappointed either. He always delivers. And he delivered with King Bongo. It reads seamlessly from beginning to end. I read it in one long dream where I forgot who and where I was, and was transported into the world Sanchez created that is really one of a kind. Bravo.
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