Novel
Havana Blue
Pasado perfecto
Leonardo Padura · 1991
Synopsis
In Havana, on the first weekend of 1989, Lieutenant Mario Conde, a disillusioned policeman who dreamed of writing, is dragged from his hangover by his chief: Rafael Morín, director of the import-export enterprise of the Ministry of Industry, has been missing since New Year's Day. Conde knew him at secondary school, where he already passed for a model, and Rafael married Tamara, the girl Conde loved. The investigation takes him back to his old friends and his past, and gradually reveals the senior official's shady dealings.
Context
The first volume of the Four Seasons tetralogy, of which it forms the winter, the novel appeared in 1991 from the University of Guadalajara press, in Mexico. It blends American-style noir with the atmosphere of Havana, and gives ample room to nostalgia for youth and to the disenchantment of a generation. Mario Conde became the hero of a long series, and Padura himself adapted the four seasons for television in 2016. Translated into French by Caroline Lepage in 2001 and into English as Havana Blue, it has also been translated into German and Italian.
Who it is for
For a crime novel that is also the melancholy portrait of a Cuban generation, at the end of the eighties.
Prizes and reception
It opens the Mario Conde series, translated into many languages, and the novelistic work of a writer now honoured in Spain.