"Dressed in the grungy trappings of a crime drama, this literary tour-de-force from Padura offers a colorful cultural history of Cuba and the island’s historical contact with Europe that helped to shape its people’s religious beliefs . . . The author forges a wondrous connection between the past and present through his characters’ faith in the statue’s occult powers and through a vivid portrait of a decayed Havana, where vestiges of opulence glimmer in the ravages of time. Padura’s novel will appeal equally to genre fans and lovers of literary thrillers."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The best detective novels, whether by Raymond Chandler or Henning Mankell, have long offered more about the societies that spawned them than casual readers digest (or possibly even care about), and Padura, by meticulous attention to detail and without preaching, is an expert in making the reader know what kind of life is possible in that bankrupt dictatorship . . . Padura reaches for an epic vision that transcends the mundane . . . Yet another rich novel by Cuba’s master novelist.” —J. Madison Davis, World Literature Today
"Padura, ably translated here by Anna Kushner, is successful sticking with Conde’s hard-boiled, secretly terrified worldview . . . I admired the ambition."
—Sarah Weinman, New York Times
01/01/2021
Heretics author Padura, whose edgy literary thrillers inspired the 2016 Netflix miniseries Four Seasons in Havana, brings back disgruntled Det. Mario Conde. Here he's asked by a onetime Marxist, now practicing Santería, to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla. That search sends Conde back to the Crusades, with the story then moving forward as a Catalan peasant named Antoni Barral appears in various guises throughout history.
2021-03-31
A socially revealing procedural by noted novelist Padura, the laureate of Havana.
To say that Padura’s detective hero, Mario Conde, is world-weary is to risk understatement. He’s almost 60, tired, fully aware that the clock is ticking: “Among his three friends, he was the one sure to lift his glass the most times, fully aware that he sought the beneficial state of unconsciousness,” writes Padura. “And whenever the recurring subject of frustrations, losses, and abandonments came up, he was the one who understood it as a matter of principles.” Working more on his side hustle than on sleuthing, Conde haunts secondhand bookshops looking for treasures to sell. Meanwhile, Bobby Roque, an old high school friend, has been plying a better trade selling rare works of art—sometimes forgeries—to the American market. Bobby’s boyfriend, however, has stepped on that lucrative business by pilfering his goodies, including a rare Black Madonna, supposedly the Virgin of Regla. Problem is, the statue doesn’t quite match the canonical requirements of the icon, giving Padura a chance to explore the religious symbolism of Spanish Catholicism as it intersects with Santería, the African tradition in which Bobby has become an adept, shedding his former doctrinaire Marxism and his pretended straightness, put on “so that everyone in our macho-socialist homeland would believe that I was what I should have been and wouldn’t take everything away from me.” The story of the theft is a fairly straightforward matter, with the usual red herrings. What is of more interest to readers looking between the lines is Padura’s unforgiving portrait of the Cuba of 2014, a couple of years before Fidel Castro’s death, in which there are definite haves and have-nots, the latter of whom live in shantytowns and lack “running water, sewers, electricity, or the ration books that guaranteed Cuban citizens minimum subsistence at subsidized prices.” In such appalling conditions, the loss of a religious statue should seem a small thing—though, of course, it’s not.
An elegant blend of mystery and sociology by one of Cuba’s most accomplished writers.
