Tropical Animal: A Novel - Hardcover

Gutierrez, Pedro Juan

3.75

990 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786714999 ISBN 13: 9780786714995

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2004

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Echoing the raw vitality of Henry Miller, Tropical Animal brings the return of the already infamous Pedro Juan, the seductive protagonist at the heart of Dirty Havana Trilogy. Pursued by Gloria, a proud and sophisticated prostitute on a mission to curb his predatory instincts, Pedro Juan is holed up in his crumbling Havana apartment, painting, with a growing sense of melancholy as he observes the lives of the hustlers, hipsters, and hookers in the city below him. An invitation to Sweden, of all places—cold, unwelcoming, the antithesis of Pedro’s Cuba—gives him an official way out, and the phone manner of his potential hostess offers incentive enough for him to leave for the literary life in Europe. However, once there he finds himself haunted by memories of the passionate Gloria and increasingly uninspired by his new environment. Does Pedro Juan, legendary seducer and imbiber of hard liquor, finally have to admit that his game is over—to be replaced by this more balanced, more secure, colder existence? In tight, tough prose Pedro Juan Guti�rrez explores human animalism with a joyous fearlessness absent from much of our contemporary culture and sheds a brilliant new light into the depths and complexities of the soul.

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About the Author:

Pedro Juan Guti�rrez began his working life at age eleven as an ice-cream vendor and newsboy. He has published several works of poetry in addition to the critically acclaimed Dirty Havana Trilogy. He lives in Havana.

From Publishers Weekly:

Guti�rrez's first book published in the U.S., Dirty Havana Trilogy, was a series of loosely connected vignettes chronicling the rough and tumble lives of Cuban down-and-outs buoyed by cheap rum, marijuana, petty crime and insatiable sexual appetites. Like that work, this murkily autobiographical novel is narrated by Pedro Juan, a 50 year-old former journalist and indomitable urban flaneur. When we first meet Pedro Juan, he's seducing Agneta, a frigid administrator at a Swedish university, with nude photos sent in the mail. At the same time he is busy with Gloria, a prostitute in his crumbling Havana apartment building who'd like him to settle down and give her babies. Intractable as ever, Pedro Juan goes to Stockholm for a literature seminar organized by Agneta, who becomes his "Swedish lover." Restless after a few months of solitude, salmon and a woman who just can't let loose between the sheets, he returns to Cuba and his "depraved" Gloria, a woman who enjoys being whipped in bed. Lurid sadomasochism, graphic descriptions of bestiality and generally brutish behavior (the "animal" of the title refers to Pedro Juan, who boasts that "what attracts me is filth") could offend, though most of the Hobbesian sentiment is excessive to the point of the grotesquely absurd. A colorful mix of Fellini and Bergman, Guti�rrez's atmospheric novel deftly mixes the rude with the refined. (Jan.)
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