Havana Gold

May 12, 2008
Mario Conde, Padura's tormented Cuban police detective, is at his anguished best in this sequentially second volume of the so-called Havana Quartet, which constitutes a four-season chronicle of one year (1989) in Conde's life, though it's the last of the four to be available in English translation. The hard-drinking, romantic Conde, who's wanted to become a writer but ended up as a policeman in a corrupt and struggling land, constantly questions his fate as he investigates the murder of young, good-looking school teacher, Lissette Núñez Delgado, who taught at Pre-University High School, the same school Conde attended in his youth. Conde's return to his old school triggers nostalgia and regrets as he interviews the headmaster, students and fellow teachers. The original title, Vientos de Cuaresma
(The Winds of Lent
), captures the extensive wind imagery that Padura skillfully uses to capture Conde's state of mind.

June 1, 2008
Cuban police detective Mario "The Count" Conde still feels "solidarity with writers, crazy people, and drunkards," but his melancholy seems to be seeping even deeper into his soul in this fourth installment of Paduras Havana Quartet. The existential angst that grips the Count is only aggravated by concern for his wheelchair-bound best friend, the 300-pound "Skinny," and frustrations with his latest case, the murder of a 26-year-old teacher at Condes former high school. But thats before he meets a sultry, redheaded saxophone player with "legs like Corinthian columns." Trouble? Of course, but its such sweet sorrow. Paduras lush, free-flowing prose seems overwrought now and then, but it is the perfect vehicle to describe both the crumbling elegance of Havana and the tortured emotional agonies of a hopelessly romantic yet terminally morose hero. The four Conde novels read as a kind of four-part bolero, each more moody and rum-soaked than its predecessor. For hard-boiled fiction fans who are soft-boiled at heart--and who cant get enough of Debussy, Ravel, and Frank Sinatra singing "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)