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Dirty Havana Trilogy Paperback | Pages: 392 pages

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Title	:	Dirty Havana Trilogy
Author	:	Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 392 pages
Published	:	February 5th 2002 by Ecco (first published 1994)
Categories	:	Fiction

Representaion Concering Books Dirty Havana Trilogy

For the last four decades, Fidel Castro's communist Cuba has survived a harsh economic blockade. In 1993, Castro attempted economic reform by allowing Cubans to use U.S. dollars and begin their own business ventures—"a huge messy free-for-all." This time of confused, low-rent capitalism is the backdrop for Pedro Juan Gutierrez's gritty, powerful, and atmospheric novel-in-stories, Dirty Havana Trilogy, translated from the original Spanish version by Natasha Wimmer.

Gutierrez, whose prose sings of grime and simple, hard-clay truths, much like the words of Junot Díaz, is a well-known member of the Latin American visual poetry movement and a magazine journalist living in Havana. Dirty Havana Trilogy is written from the semiautobiographical point of view of Pedro Juan, a 40-year-old sex-starved ex-radio journalist cobbling together an existence by selling everything from himself to drugs to whatever he can get his hands on. "Everything's worth something here," he writes.

Pedro Juan is an ex-radio journalist because in a "model" communist society nothing bad is acceptable news. Through his tormented lead character, Gutierrez provides a window into his reasons for writing such a crude book. "That's why I was disillusioned with journalism and why I started to write raw stories.... I write to jar people a little and force others to wake up and smell the shit.... That's how I terrorize cowards and mess with people who like to muzzle those of us who speak up.... My stories could run bare-assed out into the middle of the street, shouting, 'Freedom, freedom, freedom.'"

That said, be warned: Dirty Havana Trilogy is not for the faint of heart. It is raw, squarely confronting poverty, racism, violence, prostitution, and the lengths Cubans go to in order to secure the almighty buck. In one story, the man who lives across the hall from Pedro Juan, in the crumbling apartment building that serves as the focal point for much of the book, is busted by the cops for stealing human livers from the morgue and selling them on the streets as pork livers.

But survival isn't the only thing on the minds of Gutierrez's colorful characters. Oddly enough, it's the quest for release, for fits of pleasure, for some sliver of happiness no matter how warped the avenue may seem to the world outside Havana. And that quest is manifested in the hard-core sex that permeates the pages of the book. An orgasm is one of the few pleasures no one can be denied. As violent and nauseating as the sex -- and the life -- may seem on the surface, Gutierrez achieves the difficult task of lifting his characters from the muck, giving his Dirty Havana Trilogy an intellectual and emotional depth that far outweighs the carnal.

Near the end Gutierrez writes, "Born in the ruins, they just kept trying not to give up or let themselves be beaten so severely that at last they were forced to surrender. Anything was possible, everything allowed, except defeat." The book then becomes a manifesto, a well-wrought fight against literary persecution, a release the same as an orgasm, where the truth behind every dark corner, behind every door, must be told. Dirty Havana Trilogy comes from the same womb in which literature was born, a book that just may someday be held up beside those of the mighty dead.

Nelson Taylor is a freelance writer and author of the travel guide America Bizarro, published by St. Martin's Press.

Identify Books Conducive To Dirty Havana Trilogy

Original Title:	Trilogía sucia de La Habana
ISBN:	0060006897 (ISBN13: 9780060006891)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	Havana(Cuba)

Rating Epithetical Books Dirty Havana Trilogy

Ratings: 3.76 From 3270 Users | 305 Reviews

Comment On Epithetical Books Dirty Havana Trilogy

3.8.If you are not looking to confirm a preconceived viewpoint, this book is essentially hard to digest. But it still offers you a lot to think about. I like a few aspects of the writing a lot - like the almost isolated chapters and the lack of a clear chronology -, but, in the end,the main idea here is really that humanity is quite a poor species. I wouldnt disagree!

Meh... Some of the included short stories will get a laugh or pique interest but overall it just reads like a guy trying too hard to out-Bukowski Bukowski. OK, OK, Havana is desparation so people cope by engaging in lots of escapist sex - we get it, you described it 12 times already and we're not even halfway through the thing. Maybe being a monology would serve this book better.

I've got a selection of shelves on Goodreads (fiction, crime, humour, non-fict, short stories, horror etc.) and I'm not sure what to file this under. All of them? None of them?There's three books - no more than 150 pages each. The books are interchangeable and no real need to have them split out. Its made up of very short stories - either autobiographical or about a third party. A short story is told. We move onto the next chapter.Havana in the 1990s - and the underclass struggling to survive in

Dirty Havana Trilogy - Subaltern Stories'Dirty Havana Trilogy' is a collection of vignettes of life in Cuba in the early nineties and is a cult classic. It does not follow any conventional story line as such, but follows/records the experiences of Pedro Juan the main protagonist through the novel. The novel is written by 'Pedro Juan gutierrez' who himself is the main character in this book. The book does show Cuba in an unflattering manner, so persons with Communist leanings may have a problem

"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else" Italo Clavino, Invisible Cities***Just a word of warning there will be mature content in this review due to the explicit content of this novel.***This novel is a series of short vignettes that are roughly in chronological order. The book is raw, focusing on the poorest of the poor of Havana. It is 1993

The US-published English language edition of 'Dirty Havana Trilogy' describes it as, "A Novel in Stories". While it is a gruesome portrait of Havana in the 1990s, in my mind this is most certainly NOT a novel. It's more like snatches of life, notes on the depraved lengths that inhabitants of Fidel's Cuba had to go to in order to survive. I didn't mind that there was lots of sex and general unsavoury behaviour going on. What I did mind was that there was no discernible story arc, just more and

Inspired by the N.Y. Times review comparing Gutierrez to Jean Genet, I bought this book. Don't! It is an vulgar catalogue of cheap sexual encounters without credibility, taste or eroticism. The main character is unendearing, the episodes predictable, and the language banal (to be fair, perhaps due to the translation). Why would all these attractive women -- young and old -- take up with such a scruffy, lazy, worthless, drunken, mooching bum? I kept reading "Dirty Havana Trilogy" awaiting insight