Fabián y el caos
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
FICTION | 2015 | 240 pages
Cuba in the 1960s. The Revolution has succeeded and two boys, with apparently nothing in common, strike up a friendship. Pedro Juan, a familiar characters for readers of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s books, is athletic and well-built and, with time, he will become ahe will turn into a natural seducer with a preference for voluptuous women. Fabian is his total opposite: weak, easily frightened and short-sighted, he plays the piano, is homosexual and his parents are Spanish immigrants who had a better life in the pre-revolutionary times.
This impossible friendship continues throughout their lives and the paths of these two men will cross again. Pedro Juan becomes an hedonist that enjoys disorderly sex and Fabian is an artist incapable of facing a hostile reality. Both will meet again in a canned meet factory where the outcast of the new Revolutionary society work. But their fates are inevitable different.
Based on true events, Fabián y el caos is a novel of contrasts: lights and shadows, vitality and pessimism, pleasure and repression. Written with the usual direct and visceral tone of the author, Fabián y el caos is another evidence of the ravishing talent of this Caribbean Bukowski.
RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA | greek METAIXMIO | Italian EDIZIONI E/O | portuguese (brazil) ALFAGUARA | portuguese (portugal) DOM QUIXOTE | bulgarian JANET 45
“An effective and powerful narrator. There is nothing in excess in the novel, it goes to the essential, to what defines the time and the biography of the characters. It is Cuba in its pure estate. The essence of Pedro Juan.”
“A story with a direct and brutal prose, full of life and somber, that celebrates sex and shows the repression.”
“Pedro Juan Gutiérrez is able to narrate Cuba as few have done it before… He tells us about the prosecution of homosexuality, from the inside, from the figure of the father who rejects and mistreats Fabián, he also tells us the discovery of sex from two completely different points of view, and tells us, as in many of his novels, the sexual impulse, sexuality as a way of escape, as the only way for tenderness and life, he tells us about solitude, about the affections that link us to life, even if we do not know, he tells us about our parents, about old age, about misery, about desires and dreams that will never be achieved, about friendship, about life.”
BY PEDRO JUAN GUTIÉRREZ:
Mecánica popular
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Estoico y frugal
NOVEL, 2019
Diálogo con mi sombra
MEMOIR, 2017
Fabián y el caos
NOVEL, 2015
Corazón mestizo
NOVEL, 2007
El nido de la serpiente
NOVEL, 2006
Nuestro GG en La Habana
NOVEL, 2004
Carne de perro
NOVEL, 2003
El insaciable hombre araña
NOVEL, 2002
Animal tropical
NOVEL, 2000
Melancolía de los leones
STORIES, 2000
El rey de La Habana
NOVEL, 1999
Trilogía sucia de La Habana
NOVEL, 1998