Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.8.1.0126
• Published date: 01 April 2016
• Date: 01 April 2016
• Pages: 126520-133
• Author: Stephen Wilkinson

126 BOOK REVIEWS

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 8.1 SprIng 2016

Leonardo Padura, Herejes (Barcelona, Spain: Tusquets, 2011) pb 520pp.

ISBN: 978-8483834916

Reviewed by Stephen Wilkinson

When I first encountered the character, Lieutenant Mario Conde, one hot

Havana August day in 1992, I was quite simply astonished. Although the Soviet

Union had already given way to liberalism and the ‘end of history’, the boundary

of the politically and ideologically permissible in Cuba was still the threshold of

one’s own front door. So when I read Pasado Perfecto (1991), the first adventure

of this ‘conflictive’, cynical, alcoholic and masturbating detective in a crime

infested, crumbling Havana, I could not help but say to myself, ‘This guy Padura

will either end up in jail or win the Nobel Prize!’

So far, he has done neither but there is still time. If they gave a Nobel laureate

for bravery (or provocation), he would have won it years ago, and even though

the boundaries of the permissible are now on the distant horizon, Padura contin-

ues to sail his boat close to the edge. Having hammered a thousand nails into the

coffin of Stalinism in his previous novel, El hombre que amaba a los perros

(2009), his latest work, Herejes (2011), as the title somewhat uncharacteristi-

cally explicitly implies, takes on the theme of the broader human trait of reli-

gious (and political) conformity.

Herejes is already highly regarded in Spain where it was published in January

2011, having won the Premio Novela Histórica Ciudad de Zaragoza in 2014. The

judges declared that, as well as being ‘well-written’, it was ‘atypical’ as a historical

novel, in that it was in the form of a detective story. The judges were perhaps

unfamiliar with novels such as Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose or the

Cadfael Chronicles series by Ellis Peters, because the historical mystery story is in

fact a well-established sub-genre, and in writing one it is an inevitable destiny that

Padura has now fulfilled. In this novel, he combines a mystery for his heretical

(now ex) Havana policeman to solve with a historical (largely fact-based) narra-

tive that stretches back to the European middle ages, Rembrandt’s studio in

Holland during the seventeenth century and Cuba in the 1930s and 1950s.

To accomplish this, Padura uses a narrative structure that has served him well

in previous novels. His La novela de mi vida (2000), concerning the life of José

María Heredía, and El hombre que amaba a los perros, which deals with the life

and death of Trotsky, both use the same method of interlacing three or more

distinct narrative threads. These are set in different times and usually utilise a

different narrative grammar in order to create an overarching metanarrative that

in the conclusion creates much more than sum of the different parts. He employed

this technique extremely well in El hombre que amaba a los perros, splitting the