Customer Reviews

King Bongo: A Novel of Havana

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I have read most of Sanchez's novels. King Bongo does not dissapoint. What really amazes me is that this is not a best seller. This story has everything: mystery, history and humor. It brings Havana of the 50's alive. The writing is both intelligent and easy to read. If you want a great summer read and a story that will stay with you forever READ King Bongo. Wake up Hollywood this novel would make a great film.

Coming from a person who doesnt read much at all (excluding the type under pictures in magazines) This was a great get back into reading experience! I loved the book. After about 50 or so pages I thought, this would make a great movie. It played out like that in my mind so well and vivid. Maybe thats the beauty of a well written tale.

KING BONGO, Thomas Sanchez.

Five stars worth of tropical noir; what more could you ask for?

I just enjoyed reading KING BONGO, the third book that I have read by Sanchez. And once again I am deeply impressed by this talented writer. And again I have to ask myself what is it that I find so compelling about his stories. I ask myself, so that I can try to convey to potential readers why they too should read the book. Such an interesting story, set in Havana on the eve of Castro's revolution, but casting a dark shadow on all the characters. Sanchez feels the pulse of this glorious city, at this unique moment in its history. Somehow he puts it down on the written page so that you can feel it in your own pulse; such is the capability of this skillful communicator. Not only noir, but tropical noir makes Sanchez's fiction so compelling for afficionados such as myself. He reveals the truth that a life surrounded by bribery, poverty and tropical lies does not necessarily add up to an unhappy life.

But what lends his novel philosophical significance in my view however, is the way he is able to see Americans through the eyes of Cubans, rich and poor; and sometimes we might also glimpse how Cubans are seen though the eyes of Americans. Here we see two dissimilar melting pots on a collision course. Both multiracial, but with sharp differences, not only in sheer size. Here is where Sanchez scores. Those two distinct melting pots will not conjoin to form one bigger melting pot. Their moral values are so fundamentally different, and Sanchez explores the intricacies of this particular fault-line. He highlights the different social classes, and contrasts colorful Cuban daily life with the segregation mentality so prevalent in America of the fifties. Racial tolerance and interracial mixing of Cubans, all color shades blending seamlessly, with their unselfconscious lifestyle, dancing to the rhythms of their own music, unfazed by the false call of revolution; all this conveys an attractive society.

The hero of the novel, whose title the book bears, somehow seems to straddle both cultures, American and Cuban, black and white. Bongo is pulled in opposite directions at every encounter, not least because he too is a product of a black Cuban mother and a white father. Tension shows, and the resulting complex personality makes for a more interesting storyline with greater artistic truth. Sanchez explores this angle with dexterity, cutting across all social, political and economic divides.

White skinned King Bongo and his tar-skinned sister, like complementary twins, rise from poverty, exploiting their native talents. Their loves, lives, and fates are entwined against a backdrop of African Cuban native religion, Spanish colonial heritage, American consumerism, and Marxist revolutionary fervor, all sweltering in the tropical heat of Havana.

Sanchez offers a credible take on the jaundiced view that Cubans have of Americans living in their country. Americans in their view, practice hedonistic materialism, looking down their patrician noses upon this tropical paradise just off the tip of Florida. Always wanting to possess it and own it, but somehow always thwarted, and yet never quite able to subjugate it, they cannot help to both envy and resent the way the locals actually live their lives and truly enjoy themselves.

He also illuminates some of the differences in attitudes between American blacks and Cuban blacks. At the end of the day, perhaps the great racial divide that has perplexed us for so long in the West may not be bridgeable. You also glimpse the wellspring of Cuban anti-americanism, and it is not only a function of skin colour. It serves to exemplify contemporary anti-americanism in general.

Tourists cruise into a conveniently located small country offering cheap labor for their enjoyment, as if this was the sole and sufficient reason for the existence of this bejewelled island of gifted people. Tourists savor smooth rum, hand-rolled cigars, latin rhythms, easy-going women of all shades of color, sandy beaches, casinos, lush vegetation, colorful flowers, mouth-watering fruit, old colonial architecture, and nightclubs that compete with anywhere else in the world, all easily affordable to them. The insidious penetration of American dollars undermining the traditional way of life of the island is artfully described. Underneath the seafront tranquility, lurks that clash of cultures, most revealing where Bongo confronts the prejudices, attitudes and actions of an erstwhile wealthy American lover. Added to the pall of impending revolution, a botched nightclub bombing on New Year's Eve, corrupt police bosses, and an assassination attempt on the president during a racing car rally, all help to raise the stakes, and thus propel the novel into a veritable page-turner of irresistible power.

This master craftsman leaves no loose ends. All themes, including backstage details mentioned in passing, such as tapeworms and papayas, spiders and tar, are given their individual significance, and they are all duly wrapped up at the end of the story. I must add that the author's fetish for a particular item of female clothing appears throughout the story, but I will let the reader identify it for himself/herself. He also evokes the African, Spanish and Indian ancestry, producing a mix of religions, honoring the black madonna, with an undercurrent of African ritual even among hotel maids and shoeshine boys, professions not normally associated with prosperity.

Sanchez also takes a swipe at those American idealists trying to disrupt the island paradise for their own agenda, much like Grahame Greene described it in 'The Quiet American'. Cultural divide between the Hispanic and the Anglo-Saxon reminds one also of the late Henriette Doerr. Americans who cannot see past the broken sewers, undrinkable water, broken telephones and electrical power blackouts, to see the intrinsic beauty of Cuba's five hundred year old culture. Havana's inhabitants have no shadow of a doubt that they live in the center of the world, and a moment in time is captured of a people who felt no need for liberation.

Sanchez takes his novel one step beyond storytelling, with some penetrating social criticism. He pays homage to Cuban chivalry, and to their core values, and to what he calls the 'nobility of poverty'. Sensing how lucky they are, with their tenacious love of independence against the overreaching post-imperial hauter of contemporary Unites States, they are able to survive and prosper in their own way, because a well-priced bribe circumvents immediate difficulties. Native Cubans continuously express their deep love for their country, aware of how lucky they are to live in such a paradise. Proud of their culture, however poor, enjoying their own type of freedom, their music, even their martyrs and their slave ancestry, both acknowledged influences; yet the purity of their intentions shines through the superficial surface squalor. And all brought so vividly to life with the skill of Thomas Sanchez's pen. Fiction so powerful that it thrusts truth down your throat; the artist's message reaches your soul, jars your mind, and you come away affected, perhaps changed forever.



050617

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When I pointed it out to a friend, she took a long look at the slick retro Cuban 1950s dust cover art of this novel and said it looked "too cool" to her to be serious. Then I pointed to the author, whose first novel "Rabbit Boss," now 30 years old and still in print, is increasingly being included on retrospective "best of" lists. "Rabbit Boss" is literature distilled, sometimes an exasperating challenge (like, say, William Faulkner), but whereas a lot of novels today are little vanity solos, this saga of the Nevada-California Washoe Indian tribe is the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Now comes "King Bongo," a one-of-kind novel of Cuban in the Fifties, at the height of its poisoning by the worst aspects of American culture. In this book the characters do what Faulkner said characters ought to do, which is "stand up on their hind legs and howl" [with life]. Sanchez is a kind of prose poet, which can make it necessary to read a passage over two or three times now and then before you fully get the point. (You are always rewarded for your effort.) What I appreciate most of all about his writing is Sanchez' extraordinary insight into life's essential unfairness, and the follies and yearnings of men and women. His humor is not coy, but earthy. He understands absurdity, but doesn't strain to be literary, no more than Mark Twain did. What he does is focus on the Human Comedy, which of course also means the Human Tragedy. What I also respect about his writing, including the marvelous 1989 novel "Mile Zero" which seems a spiritual cousin to "King Bongo" and came famously within a hair of winning the Pulitzer Prize -- besides the virtuoso use of language and the sheer wonderful circus of the characters he brings to life in it (often at some risk, because they are not familiar cutout cliches that seem to hook so many critics like a trout going for a fly) -- is his political sensibility. Sanchez is a writer of deep compassion and it shows in the ways he portrays his characters. This is masterful storytelling. As usual with Sanchez, there's much more here than meets the eye, and that's the joy of it. Norman Mailer said long ago that of all the things that can make a writer fail, the worst is probably artistic cowardice. You'll find not a trace of that here -- Sanchez is as bold as they come, and bravo for that.

I loved King Bongo! I just finished it and loved every word of it. It would make a fantastic movie. I highly recommend this book. Thomas Sanchez is one of my favorite authors. He is a master. Every character sparkles with life, every scene is explosive. I'm speechless.

And what is the author of the first customer review talking about? It seems as if he or she knows Thomas Sanchez and has a personal vendetta against him. It reads more like a jealous lover's hate letter than a sincere review. How could he or she have read the book and written an obviously edited piece on April 22nd when the book wasn't available until the same day? It seems as if the customer-reviewer wrote the piece without reading the book unlike the brilliant reviewers from Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. And to say that Thomas Sanchez is copying Ellroy's style is uneducated because Sanchez wrote the great noir novel Zoot-Suit Murders in the 1970's which effectively predates Ellroy. Also, just because King Bongo is set in the tropics doesn't mean that it has to be the same book as Mile Zero. How does that make any sense? Thomas Sanchez is a master of many styles and is one the greatest authors around. You will love King Bongo.

King Bongo is an insurance agent with a private eye license in 1957 Cuba. The bearded ones are in the hills, putting pressure on the corrupt government. A cross dressing assassin is hunting the president. Two goons from America are hunting the Assassin. King Bongo is hunting his missing sister. Everybody seems to be hunting King Bongo.

Sometimes this book seems to be going where it isn't, but there's nothing you can do about that, because Sanchez grabs you right from the beginning and keeps tugging at you all the way through the story as you find yourself driving that Oldsmobile Rocket with Bongo as he tries to track down his beautiful, but missing sister.

Bongo is such a wonderful smuck who is afraid of nothing. His friends are loyal. His enemies formidable and the story is glorious. Circles within circles, prose to die for, characters you'll never forget. Books just don't get better than this.

One of the best novels I read in the 1990s was MILE ZERO. I pushed it on more than a few of my book reading friends and everyone agreed with my high assessment of it. When I finally got around to reading another book by the same author, it was a serious letdown. KING BONGO just isn't up to par with what I'd come to expect, though granted the bar was set very high. The writing here just felt like it was done on autopilot, and I had a hard time slogging all the way through to the lackluster climax. Too bad, but if anything it makes me want to go back and check out MILE ZERO again to see if it lives up to my memory.