Pedro juan gutierrez biography

Everyone who was fortysomething years old in that moment and who had put their bodies and souls into the revolution felt very cheated. So there were some who left their religion, others who left the country, and others, like me, who got mixed up with alcoholics and craziness. But in those texts I had no intention of criticizing or protesting, in the sense that for me the division between politics and literature is very clear.

Politics are always very circumstantial. I was already sick and tired of politics and the political debate and the heroism. I had Dostoyevsky as my model for this, who even went to prison, and was sentenced to death. On the one hand he made his political pamphlets, and, on the other, he wrote Crime and Punishment. He was a very present author, to the point where when he was making his edits, he would remove everything that could be read as a political allusion.

If it was there, it was only in a very poetic form. How does this affect you? Everyone does his own reading. PJG: What happens is that this is a very political country, in which political discourse is everywhere. The same happens with other writers. With no intention of making you uncomfortable, do you think everything went to hell after the Revolution?

Things have just evolved, and for good, for the better. For example, my books are being published here in Cuba now. Six or seven of them have already been released, and three more came out during the last Havana book fair. Are the sex scenes in your books the result of a desire to represent your own lifestyle or what is going on around you, or do they have a certain narrative function of their own?

It helps me. What happens is that instead of going and killing people like Agatha Christie does, I prefer to make them have sex, which is something more Cuban, and certainly, more agreeable. And not just the Cubans. In Mexico, in Peru, in Bolivia, people are genetically different and therefore their idiosyncrasies are different. Whoever it bothers, it bothers.

I reflect the time and place that has touched me. The despair he sees around him is somehow transformed into a primal joy of living. The theme of the book is moral, as well as physical, survival.

Pedro juan gutierrez biography

What motivates a man in an imploding society like 's Cuba? Despite the vitality of the sex and the exotic setting of decaying Havana, Dirty Havana Trilogy is a sad book full of characters at the ends of their ropes. As Roger Kaplan commented in the National Review: "It does not say everything, or perhaps not even most things, about Cuba today.

But it is probably the most honest depiction of life under Castro to have emerged in recent years. Pedro now finds himself in Switzerland conducting a seminar in literature and seducing the seminar's prim coordinator. However, when he returns to Cuba, he faces his jealous mistress, the mullata prostitute Gloria. Writing in the Library Journal, Jack Shreve noted the author's "spare, masculine style.

The narrator, once again Pedro Juan, recounts his life in a series of stories, beginning with tales of his girlfriend Silvia's rape, their parting, and his subsequent ten years of debauchery. Many years later, Pedro Juan is married to Julia but still dealing with the difficulties of living in Cuba, such as the lack of food. No podria vivi sin la soledad.

There's tranquility and silence in these days and I benefit from being able to concentrate. Maybe one writes and paints not only to create a space of freedom, but rather also to feel accompanied. Not exactly to break loneliness. It's not about that. Loneliness is always there. I feel it. I touch it. I talk with it. It forms part of my life. Loneliness is inevitable.

And it helps. I concentrate more. I'm more me when we live pushed together: loneliness and me. Leer Editar Ver historial. Herramientas Herramientas. En otros proyectos. Elemento de Wikidata. Primeros estudios [ editar ]. Trayectoria literaria [ editar ]. Dirty realism [ editar ]. Hiperrealismo Obsceno [ editar ]. Obras [ editar ].