{"id":8086,"date":"2019-07-22T06:41:05","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T10:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8086"},"modified":"2019-07-22T06:58:27","modified_gmt":"2019-07-22T10:58:27","slug":"grab-a-snake-by-the-tail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8086","title":{"rendered":"****Grab a Snake by the Tail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush — For decades, glimpses into Cuban life were hard to come by, and for Americans will be harder to come by again with renewed travel restrictions. English-language crime fiction about contemporary Cuba, written by Cubans, also has been sparse, despite reader curiosity about a tropical culture with such a heady mix of Caribbean, Spanish, African, and Indian influences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leonardo Padura, whom the book jacket calls \u201cCuba\u2019s most\ncelebrated living author,\u201d is the author of the Havana Quartet<\/em>, crime novels that in their English versions each\nhave a color in the title: Havana Gold,\nHavana Blue, Havana Red <\/em>and Havana\nBlack<\/em>. Spanish-language television films were created from them, and they\nappeared on Netflix with English subtitles as Four Seasons in Havana. This\npolice procedural follows the protagonist of those popular earlier works,\npolice inspector Mario Conde, as he reminisces about a murder investigation\nfrom 30 years ago in Havana\u2019s Barrio Chino (Chinatown). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cuba\u2019s significant Chinese community immigrated to the\nisland under contracts that amounted to slave labor, and which led to the\natmosphere of loneliness, contempt, and uprooting that forms the backdrop to\nthe narrative and sets the stage for murder. Even in a culture where diverse\nracial and ethnic identities are a commonplace, the dirty, poverty-ridden\nBarrio Chino is considered mysterious and alien to most Havana residents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conde is persuaded to look into the murder by a beautiful African-Chinese police lieutenant Patricia Chion, about whom Conde has impure thoughts. Patricia tells him to engage her father, Juan, as his guide through the barrio’s labyrinthine streets and cultural ways. That\u2019s because, as Conde says, \u201cThere were complications, as there almost always are in situations involving a chino<\/em>.\u201d (So evocative of the last line of Roman Polanski\u2019s Chinatown<\/em>: \u201cForget it, Jake. It\u2019s Chinatown.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patricia explains that the dead man, Pedro Cuang, was a\nfriend of her godfather and an acquaintance of her father, even though her\nfather denies knowing him. That would be one of the complications. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cuang was a retired dry cleaner, no family, living alone on\na pension in a dingy one-room apartment. Conde visits that apartment, where the\ncorpse has yet to be removed. He and his sergeant Manuel Palacios see the\n73-year-old has been hanged, with a couple of peculiar flourishes: a severed\nindex finger and a circle with two crossed arrows inside carved on his chest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crime was rampant in the Barrio Chino, but what Cuang\u2019s link to it may have been is murky. As is the meaning of the strange symbols. In Havana, there are lots of possibilities: a Congolese practice called nganga, Yoruba santaria, voodoo, or some heretofore unknown Chinese witchcraft. Investigating these possibilities and their practitioners gives Padura an excuse to delve into them a bit. These interesting diversions into cultural anthropology aren\u2019t distractions from the main thrust of the story. It needs them to move forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grab a Snake by the Tail<\/em> is short book that employs a somewhat literary style, appropriate for a cop who wants to be a writer. The translation seems good \u2013 you aren\u2019t frequently reminded of it, at least. The characters, especially Conde, his aide Manuel, and his unofficial deputy, Juan Chion, engage in lively interplay. There\u2019s some sex. You never have the sense detective Conde is in any serious, thriller-style danger. It\u2019s more that you\u2019re following him around a fascinating town trying to avoid the complications\u2014criminal, female and cultural. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo: dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush — For decades, glimpses into Cuban life were hard to come by, and for Americans will be harder to come by again with renewed travel restrictions. English-language crime fiction about contemporary Cuba, written … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Grab a Snake by the Tail - Havana's popular crimewriter with a new novel set in the city's former Chinese district where all the rules are different.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,632,126],"tags":[631,629,1606],"class_list":["post-8086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-police","category-reading-2","tag-cuba","tag-havana","tag-leonardo-padura"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Havana-Street-Scene.jpg?fit=288%2C384&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-26q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8086"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8089,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8086\/revisions\/8089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}