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Bookshop Dressed in the grungy trappings of a crime drama, this literary tour-de-force from Padura (
Grab a Snake by the Tail) offers a colorful cultural history of Cuba and the islandâs historical contact with Europe that helped to shape its peopleâs religious beliefs. Detective Mario Conde, an aging former cop, is hired by his old school friend, Bobby, to recover a statue of the Virgin of Regla, a Black madonna integral to Bobbyâs worship of Santeria. The statue was stolen by Bobbyâs lover, Raydel, but when Raydel and a confederate turn up murdered and high-end art dealers begin mingling with the suspects, Conde realizes Bobbyâs statue has more than just sentimental value. As Condeâs adventures lead him into increasingly dangerous waters, an alternate narrative thread follows the statueâs ownership back through time to the Crusades and the Knights Templarâa pedigree it shares with the eponymous statue of
Leonardo Padura’s
La transparencia del tiempo (Planeta 2018) has been translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner.
The Transparency of Time: A Novel will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2021. Here is a description (from US Macmillan):
From Leonardo Padura whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix’s
Four Seasons in Havana
The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history.
Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money.