BOOKS
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Subverting many of his own scathing judgments and admitting what he
consistently seems to reject, Keane concludes this uneven, gripping, but
often exasperating book with a final accolade: "Vciclav Havel was a man
who had the misfortune of being born in the twentieth century, a man
who achieved fame as the political figure who taught the world more
about power, the powerful and the powerless than most of his twentieth–
century rivals." Past tense aside, this is the truest sentence in Keane's
book. Regretfully, Havel's political biography remains to be written.
Vladimir Tismaneanu
Naked
DIRTY
HAVANA
TRILOGY. By Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Translated by
Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $25 .00
Dirty Havana Trilogy
lives up to its in-your-face title: three breathless
sets of short stories pulsating with lust, misery (both physical and emo–
tional), violence, sperm, blood, feces, endlessly sweating heat, tenement
garbage, hunger, pilfering, cheating (both State and spouses), general
moral collapse, and that most squalid of emotions, lust, which seems to
be the only glue in socialist Havana holding man and woman (and man
and man and woman and woman) together. This
rich
dirt is both toxic
and paradoxically liberating-if you can get it down without gagging.
Pedro Juan Gutierrez, a journalist, became so sick of the socialist-utopian
moralizing of the State that he decided to rub his and our noses in the
real Havana street. As his chief protagonist, he says:
For more than twenty years as a journalist,
I
was never allowed to
write with a modicum of respect for my readers, or even the slight–
est regard for their intelligence. No,
I
always had to write as if stu–
pid people were reading me, people who needed to be force-fed
ideas. And
I
was rejecting all that. Damning to hell all the elegant
prose, the careful avoidance of what might be morally or socially
offensive.
Oddly enough, Gutierrez's prose is an equally effective antigen for a
consumerist culture of Prozac and Viagra, in which the politically cor–
rect on the left and the wealthy bigots on the right make the oddest bed–
fellows in their ardor to police our thoughts .
