Product Description

Echoing the raw vitality of Henry Miller, Tropical Animal brings the return of the already infamous Pedro Juan, the seductive protagonist at the heart of Dirty Havana Trilogy. Pursued by Gloria, a proud and sophisticated prostitute on a mission to curb his predatory instincts, Pedro Juan is holed up in his crumbling Havana apartment, painting, with a growing sense of melancholy as he observes the lives of the hustlers, hipsters, and hookers in the city below him. An invitation to Sweden, of all places—cold, unwelcoming, the antithesis of Pedro’s Cuba—gives him an official way out, and the phone manner of his potential hostess offers incentive enough for him to leave for the literary life in Europe. However, once there he finds himself haunted by memories of the passionate Gloria and increasingly uninspired by his new environment. Does Pedro Juan, legendary seducer and imbiber of hard liquor, finally have to admit that his game is over—to be replaced by this more balanced, more secure, colder existence? In tight, tough prose Pedro Juan Gutiérrez explores human animalism with a joyous fearlessness absent from much of our contemporary culture and sheds a brilliant new light into the depths and complexities of the soul.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1428380 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Gutiérrez's first book published in the U.S., Dirty Havana Trilogy, was a series of loosely connected vignettes chronicling the rough and tumble lives of Cuban down-and-outs buoyed by cheap rum, marijuana, petty crime and insatiable sexual appetites. Like that work, this murkily autobiographical novel is narrated by Pedro Juan, a 50 year-old former journalist and indomitable urban flaneur. When we first meet Pedro Juan, he's seducing Agneta, a frigid administrator at a Swedish university, with nude photos sent in the mail. At the same time he is busy with Gloria, a prostitute in his crumbling Havana apartment building who'd like him to settle down and give her babies. Intractable as ever, Pedro Juan goes to Stockholm for a literature seminar organized by Agneta, who becomes his "Swedish lover." Restless after a few months of solitude, salmon and a woman who just can't let loose between the sheets, he returns to Cuba and his "depraved" Gloria, a woman who enjoys being whipped in bed. Lurid sadomasochism, graphic descriptions of bestiality and generally brutish behavior (the "animal" of the title refers to Pedro Juan, who boasts that "what attracts me is filth") could offend, though most of the Hobbesian sentiment is excessive to the point of the grotesquely absurd. A colorful mix of Fellini and Bergman, Gutiérrez's atmospheric novel deftly mixes the rude with the refined. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
Gutierrez's previous work, Dirty Havana Trilogy (2001), attracted attention as a modern Cuban permutation of the picaresque narrative, a political obloquy so thoroughly drenched with debauchery that reviewers could not quote its pithiest passages. Though no less sexually saturated, his follow-up compounds its commentary by transplanting its familiar Pedro Juan to sterile Sweden. There he finds quiet and studies contrast while digging into the reserved and perhaps prudish Agneta, who resists his objectification if not his advances. But Pedro Juan's thoughts often return to Gloria, the insatiable Havana prostitute, and readers are frequently and explicitly reminded of the old adage about taking the autobiographical protagonist out of dirty Havana but not the other way around. Those who loved the earlier work for its raw Tropic of Cancer flavor will probably be satisfied by the chaser's many lewd interludes, but those readers after political invective may be put off by this selection's complicated, evolving, and undoubtedly affectionate relationship with Cuba, where the protagonist returns for something resembling a happy ending (and the author still resides). Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A lewd, impious and brilliant novel of contemporary Cuba."