I was going to say that the Dirty Havana Trilogy was about as far as you can get from Philip Roth, apart from the preoccupation with sex and fucking, but then another parallel struck me - the protagonist is a writer (well a journalist), another (Cuban) Zuckerman. It's all heady stuff, full of poverty, dirt, sex, and racial comment. I was going to say racism, but although there are comments that you could easily say, hey that is really racist, it's more reportage, repeating the casual unexamined attitudes that you find under the surface almost anywhere. I remember an Indian colleague of mine who said that going to Cuba was the first time that he had been anywhere where there wasn't a hint of racism in his reception, where he felt the colour of his skin was completely irrelevant.
The poverty is in your face, it smells, it's not clean, it's not a fastidious book, or a book for the fastidious. There used to be a kind of American literature branded "Dirty Realism", whole Granta anthologies of it which were good to read, but this really fits the term. Instead of nice apartments and houses backing onto mountains there are shacks with no plumbing, single rooms with wooden platforms where a child sleeps in one corner while they fuck in the other, the building seemingly collapsing around them as stones and dust rain down. The whole feel is episodic rather than constructed, hot, dusty, drug and alcohol hazed chaos. Like Charles Bukowski in a hot climate, without any grinding post office to work in, just the occasional hustle to move things along and get some cash, food, drugs, drink, sex.
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