Outcast - Softcover

Latour, Jose

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771046618 ISBN 13: 9780771046612

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2007

Synopsis

From the hot writer everybody’s talking about — the author of the sensational Havana Best Friends.

Elliot Steill, the product of a brief union between his Cuban mother and an American-born labourer, is an unhappy teacher in Havana when a man claiming to be a friend of Steill’s deceased father arrives in Cuba and offers him the chance to escape. The plan goes dangerously amiss, and Steill is soon on the hunt through Miami’s mean streets for the man who betrayed him. To find him, Steill first has to figure out why he was singled out, an exercise that has him mentally searching his past in Cuba for clues.

The fast-paced story, which reveals as much about real life in Cuba as it does about the émigré community in Miami, sees Steill transformed into a man of hair-trigger reactions as he’s forced into playing an increasingly violent game of cat and mouse. In just one of the novel’s many twists, the teacher becomes the fast learner he has to be to navigate this new world of greed, corruption, and crime — but also of compassion so unexpected it is wrenching.

About this title

Review:

The recent explosion of Cuba-mania means that people who don't speak a word of Spanish are singing along with Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, and the rest of the Buena Vista wunder-octogenarians; that Cuban cigars are more chic than clichéd; and that José Latour, popular Cuban thriller writer, is publishing his first English-language novel. Set partly in Havana and partly in Miami, Outcast will provide many Anglophone noir fans with their first glimpse of that genre as practiced in a country still largely tantalizing in its inaccessibility.

Elliot Steil, born of a Cuban mother to a long-vanished American father, may not love his life in Havana (as an English teacher earning the equivalent of $2 a month, who would?), but he loves the city itself for its tattered elegance and the warmth of its people. His response to the communist political philosophy that underpins and overlies Cuba is one of generally resigned apathy. The arrival of Dan Gastler, who claims to be an old friend of Elliot's father, catapults Elliot from apathy to action when Gastler offers the teacher a chance to escape to the U.S. on his sailboat.

But Gastler shoves Elliot overboard mid-journey, leaving him to die in the Florida Straits. The serendipitous arrival of a family of Cuban rafters prevents him from drowning, but does little to assuage Elliot's baffled fury. The answers come slowly, as the teacher tackles a dual mission: to survive financially and psychologically as a Cuban refugee in Miami, and to uncover the identity and motive of his attacker. The former pulls him gradually into the city's grungy criminal underbelly, and the latter entangles him in a treacherous web of bitter family history and political machinations--with deadly consequences.

Though Latour is no Vladimir Nabokov (his grasp of English, while certainly commendable, doesn't prevent a host of bizarre phrasings from jarring the reader's eye and ear), Outcast is at heart a workmanlike thriller. Its innate straightforwardness, however, is often at odds with Latour's efforts to fancy things up with arbitrary chronological leaps and shifts in narrative perspective, which undermine the novel's pacing and plot. But for readers looking for a glimpse into Cuban American life through a rarely used prism, Outcast will deliver the goods. --Kelly Flynn

About the Author:

José Latour is one of the Spanish-speaking world’s top crime-fiction writers and a former vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. In 2002, he left Cuba for Spain and immigrated to Canada in the fall of 2004. Latour’s novels have been published in Britain, the USA, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Brazil and the Netherlands. In 2006, his novel Havana Best Friends was published in Canada to high praise from all reviewers. Latour lives in Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0771046618
• ISBN 13: 9780771046612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344