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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780060006891
ISBN: 0060006897
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: February 01, 2002
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: February 05, 2002
Sales Rank: 336649
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, this picaresque novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former Cuban journalist living from hand to mouth in the squalor of contemporary Havana, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of so many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once-elegant apartment houses that line Havana's waterfront, Pedro Juan's days and nights have been reduced by the so-called special times -- the harsh recession that followed the Soviet Union's collapse -- to the struggle of surviving the daily grit through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger -- all the while observing his lovers and friends, strangers on the street, and their suffering with an unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I'm not really sure what the real merit of this book is. Certainly it is a pugnacious, visceral, pungent look at the seam of Cuban life that includes plenty of men and women fornicating, fighting and flaneuring their way through life -such is the oppressive poverty inflicted on them by Castro (surely no one can mourn his stepping down this month - any leader of a country that denies its citizens basic freedoms is surely a rotten pernicious dictator, however iconoclastic). The first chapter incorporates ... Read More
Rating:  -
There's some truth to the reviews submitted by readers prior to mine. The book is lewd & full of debauchery, but there's more to it.
The stories are about the destitute and hopeless at the edge at risk of slipping outside civilized society. It's commentary about 1990s Cuba, but it's also about meaning and purpose. Pedro Juan's character has nothing, no one - he escapes the banality of poverty through booze and lots of graphically described sexual encounters. But the sex isn't glorious or even ... Read More
Rating: -
The novel lives up to every promise of the title. Every page is a rum soaked lustful portrait of a society full of life, its struggle for survival told by (and symbolized by) 'Pedro Juan', a hustler always looking for his next meal, drink or lay. The Cuba that many only know through Hemingway is long past, yet the warm character of its people and the beauty of the Malecon comes through like a sweet sea salt breeze.
Rating:  -
As I read Juan Gutierrez masterful work, I was reminded of some of the great poetic dramatic monologues, particularly Browning's. No doubt that was an idiosyncratic association, probably not intended by Gutgierrez, but there is a lot to recommend the comparison. There is a single narrator, Pedro Juan, and the reader acts as the silent listener both rapt by the narrator's tales yet often repulsed by his character but unable to stop listening (the book is a page-turner). Of course the crucial element in a ... Read More
Rating:  -
I wholeheartedly agree with reviewer William Apt below me, when he says that this book portrays Havana residents as a bunch of lust-driven beggars and hustlers living literally in their own excrement. While it is the author's right to portray Havana in whatever way he likes, readers should not be misled into thinking this is the real city, as many of them do (as shown by their reviews).
The real Havana, the real Cuba, is nothing like that. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, polite, affable ... Read More
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