Leonardo Padura's Works Sell at the International Book Fair

February 12, 2020

The first installment of a tetralogy of re-edited novels by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura under the title "The Four Seasons" was added last Sunday to the literary offerings of the XXIX International Book Fair of Havana.

Padura, winner of the National Literature Prize 2012 and the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters in 2015, is one of the most internationally acclaimed Cuban writers, but paradoxically his work is published in Cuba in low print runs that readers devour each time they appear in any literary space on the island.

The Book Fair has included in this year's program the noir novel duo Perfect Past and Lenten Wind, which feature detective Mario Conde as the protagonist, the most famous character in his literary work.

Two other novels—Masks and Autumn Landscape—will reappear in the second volume to round out this new edition published by the publishing house of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (Uneac).

"In these years of so many conflicts and complex social situations, I created Mario Conde, a character who embodies a different way of seeing life," Padura said at the presentation of the titles that make up the well-known saga centered on the iconic detective that first appeared in 1989 and appeared for the eighth and last time in 2018 in The Transparency of Time, not yet published in Cuba.

Padura (Havana, 1955), considered one of the most important voices in Cuban literature, has said on a previous occasion that he does not understand his life without that of his literary companion Mario Conde, whom he describes as an "essential piece" in his work as a writer and also in his personal life.

The author of other acclaimed literary works such as The Novel of My Life, Heretics, or the acclaimed The Man Who Loved Dogs, believed that the fact of publishing these titles together "especially pleases him, fulfills the expectation with which they were born and returning them to the Cuban stage is a pleasure."

In presenting the volume, writer Francisco López Sacha noted that in taking up these texts again, a "debt" to Padura's Cuban public is settled, followers of his work.

López Sacha said that in these works the author manages to combine "style, character, situation, city and historical era, in a narrative that illustrates a complex context," as was the case with the so-called "Special Period" of the nineties of the last century on the Island.

He also highlighted in these novels the presence of an "different" character, an atypical police officer who strips bare more than a plot, contemporary Cuban society, with an excellent refined style, efficient, functional without renouncing poetic imagery, nourished by the excellent journalism he did and the influence of the great classics.

The Four Seasons became in 2015 a film based on a screenplay written by Leonardo Padura himself and his wife, Lucía Coll, which featured Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría as Mario Conde, and was also adapted for a television serial.