AMAZING ( )

This is not so much a novel as a ramshackle bunch of vaguely connected chapters. It's very immediate and direct, and pure filth in places, in both senses of the word. It certainly conjures up the atmosphere of a place falling apart and filled with dysfunctional people trying to get by. It's quite exhilerating and sometimes funny. It gets a bit repetitive though. ( )

Found this on a late night wandering session in Borders - always the best time for rooting out new authors. I wasn't disappointed with the choice. This is a great book. It's certainly not for the faint-hearted - Gutierrez writes brutally explicit prose in the first of the three parts - but its point becomes clear as this fits into the trio of 'novellas'. The brutal, sexually charged backdrop this creates is the perfect foil for the second of the trio, which seems to develop further the description of abject poverty in modern-day Havana. The final portion of the novel focuses in more depth on individual portraits, all the more vital and comprehensible for the understanding the reader has of the context of their lives. All this is relayed through the eyes of the debauched Pedro Juan - a character towards whom my initial disgust and dislike was gradually replace by, if not fondness (for that would be too much), at least comprehension as he skillfully developed throughout the three parts. This book is incredibly well-written and accessible - I ran through it in a couple of days and was completely absorbed by the atmosphere in squalid and depressed Havana. Despite myself, I found that I was disappointed to be done with Pedro Juan and could almost say I missed him once he was gone! I'd definitely recommend this. ( )

Currently I'm reading The insatiable spiderman so another Gutierrez book review will probably soon follow this one. In some respects this work by Pedro Juan resembles a Bukowski kind of fictional world--one thinks here of Post Office and Factotum. There is more however of Havana Cuba in Dirty Havana Trilogy than there is of Los Angeles in either of the above mentioned Bukowski books and it gives to Pedro Juan's book a grittier feel. This is tell all or no holds barred auto-biographical fiction at its best--brazen and ribald but always with Pedro Juan very much in objective control of his material. It is often harsh but even more often hilarious--he describes the center of Havana as if it were a huge collosal garbage dump on a blazing hot and sticky day--with all varietes of human life swarming around the mess. It is a drunken and lecherous ride Pedro Juan takes us on but also an exhilarating and rewarding one. ( )

Classified as erotic fiction sometimes, Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez is more or less an important and overlooked novel dealing with the bleak period of Cuba during the early to mid-1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the novel was/is banned in Cuba and the author keeps a very low profile in Havana avoiding interviews. ( )