Pedro Juan Gutiérrez Books In Order

Novels

  1. Dirty Havana Trilogy (2001)
  2. Tropical Animal (2003)
  3. The Insatiable Spider Man (2005)
  4. Our GG in Havana (2010)

Novels Book Covers

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez Books Overview

Dirty Havana Trilogy

Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish speaking world, this picaresque novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former Cuban journalist living from hand to mouth in the squalor of contemporary Havana, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of so many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once elegant apartment houses that line Havana’s waterfront, Pedro Juan’s days and nights have been reduced by the so called special times the harsh recession that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse to the struggle of surviving the daily grit through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger all the while observing his lovers and friends, strangers on the street, and their suffering with an unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye.

Tropical Animal

Pursued by Gloria, a proud and sophisticated prostitute bent on curbing his wandering instincts, Pedro Juan is holed up in his crumbling Havana apartment painting, beset by a growing sense of melancholy as he observes the lives of the hustlers, hipsters, and hookers in the city below. An invitation to Sweden cold, unwelcoming, the antithesis of Pedro Juan’s Cuba gives him an official way out. However, once in Europe he finds himself haunted by memories of the passionate Gloria and increasingly uninspired by this new environment. Does Pedro Juan, legendary seducer and sensual explorer, finally have to admit that his game is over, to be replaced by this more balanced, more secure, colder existence? In his tight, tough prose, Pedro Juan Guti rrez continues to explore human animalism with a joyous fearlessness absent from much of our contemporary culture and, in so doing, sheds a brilliant new light into the depths and complexities of the soul. With Tropical Animal, Pedro Juan Guti rrez confirms his status as one of the finest new voices in not only contemporary Latin American literature, but in all of contemporary fiction.

The Insatiable Spider Man

Pedro Juan Gutierrez exploded onto the literary landscape three years ago with his bestselling novel, Dirty Havana Trilogy. Hugely acclaimed for its honest depiction of a Cuban capital characterized by sleaze, sex, poverty and hedonism, in The Insatiable Spiderman we see the return of its anti hero, who is again prowling the streets of Havana. Pedro Juan’s relationship with his wife, Julia, is in terminal decline, and the trappings of domestic bliss hold no charms for this most restless and predatory of men. Our narrator’s interests lie elsewhere: in the infinite possibilities of a chaotic Caribbean city and the chancers, artists and prostitutes who roam the streets. In his inimitably uncompromising and exhilarating style, Pedro Juan Gutierrez again takes the reader on a journey into the underbelly of contemporary Havana a world of easy sex, hard drinking and humorous anecdote that will be all too recognizable to the Gutierrez connoisseur.

Our GG in Havana

GG who may or may not be Graham Greene arrives in Havana in 1955 in search of a good time. He heads to the Shanghai Theatre, and after becoming transfixed by the many sex acts he sees, he goes backstage to meet the star of the show, Charity. GG falls for her, and the pair spend the night together. But when he returns the following night, he finds, to his horror, a dead body in her dressing room; and a newspaper article reveals he’s considered the culprit. Packed with vacuum salesmen, Cuban intelligence officials, dead bodies, spies from around the world and the heady nightlife of Havana, Gutierrez re writes ‘Our Man in Havana’, lacing the narrative with observations of Greene’s work, his sources of inspiration, his desires and his phobias in a novel of sex, spies and literary commentary.

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