If in American literature we find the corrosive Charles Bukowski As the most recognized exponent of dirty realism, it is also worth noting that the reply with the greatest intensity in Spanish is found in Cuban Pedro Juan Gutierrez, and which in turn leads to interesting cases such as the Spanish Thomas Arranz.
The crudeness and simplicity in the descriptions of the story are put at the service of the ultimate cause of this trend, born in the XNUMXth century and which sought to shape the most soulless prose to convey the greatest feelings of disenchantment and nihilism as a form of surrender to the open grave. to the life.
To read Pedro Juan Gutiérrez is to surrender to the human being as an animal whose reasoning is restricted to the sniff of reality, to surrender to instincts, to the most complete physiological sensations, from the neuronal to the eschatological aspect, passing through that great engine. essential that is sex, that peremptory need to discharge the little that is eternal that unites us to the world: the orgasm.
Let's say that the typical Cuban scenarios of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez have something more lace. The American authors who wrote this kind of dirty realism, in its most stark aspect, always ended up supporting themselves in the transgression, in the moral shock that reading their books supposed.
But Cuba is Cuba... And it could be that the assumption of internalized fatality in the inhabitants of an island busy with daily life, in spinning around the sun, in sleeping and waking up without an alarm clock, in the movements of the inertia under the rule of sex as the guru of existence, more naturally embrace a simplistic and at the same time overwhelming ideology about the world.
It never hurts to read one of these authors to shed so much superficiality until staying with what sounds fundamental from its pages: the fertilization of the world.
Top 3 recommended books by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Dirty Havana trilogy
Dirty realism always has a point of explicit declaration of intent. Intentions that go through overthrowing any hint of philosophy, social or political idealism as well as a surrender to the defeatism of lucidity that involves discovering that behind the curtain of existence there is nothing left, the theater is always a practically empty room in the that only you perceive the execrable dimension of your work.
This is not a defense of pessimism but a plea for survival. He does not succumb to fatalism at all but sways in its waters. And ultimately it supposes a physiological philosophy, one that makes it clear that it is best to eat when you can and fuck if they let us.
Talking about all this in a Cuba submerged in its own isolation could be understood as criticism. But when analyzing the protagonist, one does not guess a claim of injury compared to other places, the whole world is that same Cuba, the universe is a place where only fucking is worth it.
And ... What is the best of Cuba and the world? Well, women and rum, for Pedro Juan it all comes down to that, and his marginal life would be the same where he offers us his simple story but loaded with images or in the best palace where his entourage of wretches would pay homage to him.
Tropical animal
For me, this novel brings large doses of absolute dirty realism, the one that fiercely shows you the limits of maturity with old age (in any of the senses of "getting old").
Pedro Juan, the protagonist and once again undoubted alter ego of the author, is already 50 years old, a difficult age to continue seeing the world with that patient lightness of someone who has his whole life ahead of him.
In the end, any character with dirty realism is a Dante exposed to the same circles of hell, only without epic, or lyric, or possibility of amendment.
And in this scenario, the only possible way out is surrender to hedonism. Pedro Juan is a guy freed from everything who is capable of loving and surviving, with the looming shadows of the twilight existence related at times from sarcastic contemplation, from indifference or from restlessness.
Because the human is a contradiction and no realism dirtier than that, the contradiction of living, especially after certain ages. A novel devoted to sexual instincts on an island where you can love at any time and in any place. Misery is what you have ...
The king of Havana
In case there was any doubt. Pedro Juan is the king of Havana. It's like when you imagined that you were that girl's boyfriend every time she didn't fucking pay attention to you.
Of course, considering a young Pedro Juan who moves through the streets among old men and shiny glass with his eternal youth as a flag, it can be understood that there is no other king than him. The apocalypse is not so when the heart still beats young and continues to invite constant fornication and drink to lose oneself in tender ravings of madness.
Around the young Pedro Juan, a crowd of inhabitants of Havana sniff life in search of ephemeral glories, with sensations that move us between the immense humanity of misery and the miserable inhumanity of poverty.
For the author, abounding in the life of Pedro Juan and many other satellite protagonists is always necessary for awareness and, why not, as an invitation to the philosophy of survival, that which is dictated by the priorities of the stomach and sex .
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