Say Leonardo Padura that is Cuba, because all the work of the narrator, journalist, essayist and screenwriter is fed and woven around the island where he was born in 1955, a few years before the revolution, its history its stark reality, nostalgia, sea, boleros and endless nights.
And it is that Padura, who also has Spanish nationality since 2011, has always said that Cuba was the matter of his literary and journalistic work; so although sometimes speak of adventure, murder black key or stolen paintings, everything converges on the island, from which he never left, as if made so many exiles, even though his gaze has always been very critical .
Awarded today with the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters , Leonardo Padura has been seeing, as gradually his intense and prolific work, done with a precise writing, also nourished of journalism, who loves words, it treats them as manageable mud, has grown to become today the most international and translated Cuban writer.
In 2012 he received the National Prize for Literature in his country by “ Heretics “, novel that along with “ The Man Who Loved Dogs ” are considered by some critics as “perfect”. Two ambitious and iconic books in contemporary literature.
Edited in Spain by Tusquest, the label that published all his work in “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” translated into ten languages and Prix Initiales in France or the Critics in Cuba, Padura makes a harsh critique of Stalinism to talk about the murder of Trotsky and his murderer, Ramon Mercader.
“Stalin was the last great theoretician of Marxism” and his death was a point of no return in the failure of the socialist utopia. “The greatest hoax of the twentieth century was Stalinism,” the writer said in an interview, glad that this book with a very unfamiliar topic was published for Cubans on the island.
And in “Heretics” award also historical novel City of Zaragoza, the author in key thriller, he resumed a ‘shameful “chapter, in his own words, on the abandonment of hundred Jews aboard the SS St. Louis in 1939 fleeing from the Nazis and whose purpose was they were welcomed in Cuba.
Padura is the creator of a series of books of detective genre, who follow the tradition of crime fiction, so also influenced by Vazquez Montalban, who made famous his detective Mario Conde, a former policeman who lives in Havana, accompanied by his friend, “El Flaco”, who solves murders, robberies and all sorts of shenanigans and always very concerned about the social reality.
Belonging to a generation disillusioned by the drift that took the Cuban revolution, a theme that runs throughout his work, Padura states as of late have been produced movements in Cuba, “slowly, but move.”
In fact, Mario Conde is a sort of “alter ego” of the Cuban writer, a man who shares the same generation as he, his disappointments and nostalgia and that serves the author to put the magnifying glass on the Cuban reality today.
In his latest book published in Spain, “That was willing happen,” a personal anthology of stories that came out last March, Padura shows, if anything, more Cuban than ever, in pieces, ranging from 1980 to 2000.
A frieze of the last thirty 30 years of Cuba. “Of the 80, when lived well by Soviet support: you could buy a few extra shoes, go to a small restaurant to eat or go to a small hotel in Varadero, at 90, we hit bottom in the hollow of the crisis “.
“In the 90s began the special period that ended -more- end of the decade, when a slight recovery began arriving until today, but with a Cuba that is already very different,” the award-winning author
Some poignant stories, full of life, eroticism, love and nostalgia for a changing Cuba.
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