Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes (born October 10, 1955) is a
Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
n novelist and journalist. , he is one of Cuba's best-known writers internationally. In his native Spanish, as well as in English and some other languages, he is often referred to by the shorter form of his name, Leonardo Padura. He has written screenplays, two books of short stories, and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages. In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and the most important award of its kind. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras of Spain, one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world and usually considered as the Iberoamerican Nobel Prize.
Life and career
Padura, who was born in
Havana
Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.Latin American literature at the
University of Havana
The University of Havana (UH; ) is a public university located in the Vedado district of Havana, the capital of Cuba. Founded on 5 January 1728, the university is the oldest in Cuba, and one of the first to be founded in the Americas. Originall ...
. He first came to prominence in 1980 as an investigative journalist for a literary magazine called '' Caimán Barbudo'', a well-established publication that is still published today. He became known as an
essay
An essay ( ) is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a Letter (message), letter, a term paper, paper, an article (publishing), article, a pamphlet, and a s ...
ist and a writer of
screenplay
A screenplay, or script, is a written work produced for a film, television show (also known as a '' teleplay''), or video game by screenwriters (cf. ''stage play''). Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of w ...
s and in particular, detective novels.
He wrote his first short novel between 1983 and 1984. Titled '' Fiebre de caballos'' ("Horse Fever"), it was basically a love story. During the next six years, he continued to work as a journalist, reporting on a wide range of cultural and historical topics. However, around this time he began to write his first novel featuring police officer Mario Conde. While he was writing it, Padura realised how fundamental his years as a journalist were to his development as a writer. First, it gave him a whole new experience of the country, and secondly, it changed his style with respect to his first book.
In 2013, France named him a ''Chevalier'' of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The Order of Arts and Letters () is an order of France established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its supplementary status to the was confirmed by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. Its purpose is the recognition of significant ...
.
Padura still lives and writes in his native city of Havana.
"In one of his essays entitled 'I would like to be
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), ' ...
,' Padura complains that he would love not to be constantly asked about politics in his country and why he continues living there. But this is very much his niche: he is widely seen as the best writer in Cuba, a country whose best writers were all formed before Castro rule. He offers us an off-the-beaten-path visit of a relatively closed society, a prose that is free of propaganda (though not liberated from surveillance). By occupying a small but significant critical space in Cuba, Padura becomes more interesting for Cuba observers and more intriguing for students of cultural and literary trends in the island."
Mario Conde books
Padura is best known in the English-speaking world for his quartet of detective novels featuring lieutenant Mario Conde. Collectively titled ''Las cuatro estaciones'' (''The four seasons''), they are sometimes called ''The Havana Quartet'' in their English translations. Conde is a cop who would rather be a writer, and admits to feelings of "solidarity with writers, crazy people, and drunkards". These books are set respectively in winter, spring, summer and autumn (''Vientos de cuaresma'' literally means "Lenten Winds" and ''Paisaje de otoño'', "Autumn landscape"):
*''Pasado perfecto'' (1991, translated as ''Havana Blue'', 2007)
*''Vientos de cuaresma'' (1994, translated as ''Havana Gold'', 2008)
*''Máscaras'' (1997, translated as ''Havana Red'', 2005)
*''Paisaje de otoño'' (1998, translated as ''Havana Black'', 2006)
Padura has published five subsequent books featuring Conde, the
novella
A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most novelettes and short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) ...
''Adiós Hemingway'', ''La neblina del ayer'' (''The Fog of Yesterday'', published in English as ''Havana Fever'')., ''La Cola de la Serpiente'' (''Grab a Snake by the Tail''), ''Herejes'' (''Heretics'') and ''La Transparencia del Tiempo'' (''The Transparency of Time''). ''Adiós Hemingway'' was Padura's first book to be translated into English, in 2005. Th Havana-Cultura website comments on the similarities and differences between Padura and Hemingway, and how they might explain Padura's decision to feature the expatriate American in ''Adiós Hemingway''.
''Paisaje de otoño'' won the 1998 of the (International Association of Crime Writers). This prize should not be confused with the similarly named Hammett Prize given by the North American branch of the organization, which is restricted to United States and Canadian authors.
The four books were adapted as four
Spanish-language
Spanish () or Castilian () is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a world language, gl ...
television films, which have been released in a group with English subtitles as the
Netflix
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...
mini-series '' Four Seasons in Havana''. They star Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría and were produced by Tornasol Film.
An English-language remake named ''Havana Quartet'' was considered by Starz, with Antonio Banderas tagged to act as Conde, but it did not proceed beyond the development stage. In 2014, BBC Radio broadcast dramatizations of the four stories starring Zubin Varla.
Other works
Padura's historical novel ''El hombre que amaba a los perros'' ('' The Man Who Loved Dogs'') deals with the 1940 death of wanted fugitive and Russian revolutionary
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure ...
, and the NKVD agent responsible for eliminating him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is perhaps Padura's most ambitious and accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted publicity mainly because of its political theme. It centres "on Stalin’s murderous obsession with Leon Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...
", and considers "how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias."
Padura's books are also available in French (including all the books featuring Conde), Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and Danish.
Bibliography
Books
*
* ''Pasado perfecto'', 1991 ("Havana Blue", 2007).
* ''Máscaras'', 1997 ("Havana Red", 2005).
* ''Paisaje de otoño'', 1998 ("Havana Black", 2006).
* ''Vientos de cuaresma'', 2001 ("Havana Gold", 2008).
* ''La novela de mi vida'', 2002.
* ''Adiós Hemingway'', 2005.
* ''La neblina del ayer'', 2005 ("Havana Fever", 2009).
* ''El hombre que amaba a los perros'', 2009 ('' The Man Who Loved Dogs'', 2014).
* ''La cola de la serpiente'', 2011.
* ''Regreso a Ítaca'' (Return to Itaca, 2016)
* ''Herejes'', 2013 ("Heretics", 2017).
* ''La transparencia del tiempo'', 2018.
* ''Como polvo en el viento'' ("Like Dust in the Wind", 2020)
* ''Personas decentes'', 2022.
Critical studies and reviews of Padura's work
*
* "How to Write from Mantilla, or the Small Heresies of Leonardo Padura," chapter 5 in Yvon Grenier, ''Culture and the Cuban State, Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism'' (Lexington Books, 2017).
References
Further reading
*Uxo, Carlos, ed. (2006). ''The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes.'' Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University Press. . Articles in English and Spanish.
*Wilkinson, Stephen (2006). ''Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture''. Oxford & Berne: Peter Lang. (US 0-8204-7963-2). This book contains four chapters on Padura and a history of the Cuban detective genre.
*González, Eduardo, (2006). ''Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora''. The University of North Carolina Press. . The long last section of this book is dedicated to Padura's four novels: ''Las cuatro estaciones,'' under the title: "1989: The Year that Never Was."