May 3, 2007
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2007/05/03/cultura/artic06.html
Trotsky’s exile
will be the topic of Padura’s new novel
OLGA CRESPO
The man who loved dogs
is the title chosen by writer Leonardo Padura for a novel about Russian
politician Leon Trotsky which he expects to have ready by 2008 after
three years of research.
In statements to
the press in western Cuba’s Pinar del Río city, the prize-winning author
pointed out that, unlike his previous work, two of the three stories
included in this novel are set outside Cuba, namely in Europe and
Mexico. He remarked, however, that he’s trying to make it very typical
of the Island.
For the moment he
disclosed that it’s based on the exile years of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
until his assassination, and to that end it browses through the October
Revolution, [former Mexican president] Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency and
the figure of Mercader, who assassinated the controversial Russian
revolutionary.
The latter is a
purely fictional approach –Mercader tells his story to a young Cuban
veterinary student– based on the true fact that the killer spent his
last four years in Cuba.
“I hope the book
will be entertaining without detriment to its underlying overview of the
reasons which frustrated the utopian conception of the society of
equals, not only a possibility but also a necessity for 21st–century
mankind”, Padura said.
He revealed his
idea, still in embryo, about the reappearance of Mario Conde, the
leading character in many of his detective novels whose easy-going
manner and proven integrity have earned him many fans.
Born in Havana in
1955, Leonardo Padura is an outstanding writer, journalist, scriptwriter
and critic, and his contribution to detective novel-writing in Cuba is
held to be his major accomplishment. (AIN)
Leonardo Padura to start new novel about Trotsky’s exile
Havana, May 3 (PL)._ Cuban writer Leonardo Padura will
give his alter ego Mario Conde a temporary break and put his mind to
writing a novel about Leon Trotsky’s exile after a three-year-long
research on the Russian politician.
With seven
eighths of the iceberg in his favor –as Ernest Hemingway called the huge
substratum hidden beneath the small ice tip showing on the surface– he
thinks it will take him 12 months before his new project will become a
reality.
He has
formed a mental image of a novel based on three stories: one in Europe,
another in Mexico and the third one in Cuba, in a melting pot of
cultures and environments which he says in no way disrupts the book’s
Cuban hallmark.
Padura
intends to spin a plot for his character (1879-1940) from his years in
exile up to his assassination, against the backdrop of the October
Revolution and Lázaro Cárdenas’s days in Mexico. The thread of his
story, told by a Cuban Veterinary Medicine student, will be Ramón
Mercader, the murderer of the controversial Trotsky.
The author
will retain a certain deal of entertainment as befits any literature
worthy of that name since the times of Greece, without detriment to a
reflection on the reasons leading up to the collapse of the utopia in
the piece of this world where Trotsky grew up, a utopia more than ever
necessary to the 21st Century man, he remarks.
Bonded to
Conde by the umbilical cord of fiction and the life of an antihero whom
the said fiction turned forever into a quite human character, Padura is
already planning his reappearance in another chapter of his lengthy
saga.
Conde
shoulders a tetralogy where crime is merged into high-flying literature
–Paisaje de otoño (Autumn scenes), Máscaras (Masks),
Vientos de cuaresma (Lenten winds) and Pasado perfecto (Past
perfect)– which, overall, conform a singular version of Las cuatro
estaciones (The four seasons) in the most genuine style of crime
novel-writing.
apr ag
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