Leonardo Padura announced in Havana the return of his most emblematic character: Mario Conde as part of the plot of his new novel Herejes, in which he is still working.
The expected announcement exhilarated Padura’s followers, who hadn´t recently been enjoying the adventures of a character the author recreated throughout his novels Pasado Perfecto, Vientos de cuaresma, La cola de la serpiente, Adiós Hemingway and La neblina del ayer.
After feeding the life of this Havana police for more than ten years Padura decided to let him rest and perhaps never to revive him so he became involved in the writing of El hombre que amaba los perros, in which are intertwined Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, his killer, and a young Havana man in the 1990s.
Subsequently Cuban writer conceived the script of the coral film Siete días en La Habana, written with his wife, in which are involved such disparate filmmakers as Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero , Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noe, John Carlos Tabio and Laurent Cantet.
When the return of Mario Conde seemed almost impossible, Leonardo Padura invites him to form part of the universe that recreates in his most recent novel Herejes. In this work we can appreciate the same method Padura has also used in other creations like La novela de mi vida and El hombre que amaba los perros. This is putting to dialogue times and different leading roles to give his particular vision of different moments in the history of world and Cuba, and although both apparently are not related, the author always finds the way to put them in contact to reflect on Cuban contemporary reality.
Hence one of the main characters is Elias, a Sephardic Jew who violates the precepts of the Mosaic law in his desire to become a painter and working in the studio of Rembrandt, in Amsterdam in the seventeenth-century. Later Cuba enters the scene in the late 50s of the twentieth century and the early years of the 21st century, where Mario Conde reappears, and is required to discover the whereabouts of two people linked to a famous painting by the remarkable Dutch artist.
The Cuban writer told the publication of Herejes in 2013 will be borne by Spanish publishing house Tusquets, with which he has been publishing his books and also Ediciones Union on the Cuban part.
The news of the return of Mario Conde transpired under the Author Week, which ran from November 27 through the 30, that Casa de las Americas devoted for the first time to a Cuban writer, after 10 years in which writers and critics from Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Guadeloupe shared their experiences with their readers in Havana.
Author
Laura Paz
