Dirty Havana Trilogy By Pedro Juan Gutierrez

A seamy sexual odyssey does Cuba no justice

As Patrick Süskind showed with his brilliant novel Perfume, smell can be a marker for class, morality and even intelligence. More importantly smell can be the basis for a cracking story. Dirty Havana Trilogy strikes a loose parallel with Süskind's masterwork. At best it's a metaphoric stink bomb. At worse it's the cheapest of literary eau de cologne.

The book is a trawl through the Cuban capital's dilapidated tenements, ration queues and black-market trading. Our narrator anti-hero, Pedro, a former journalist, bums from one dead-end job to the next to eke out a meagre existence. The narrative sulphur comes from the sexual odyssey that underscores Pedro's hapless employment capers. If he isn't struggling with the rent, he's struggling with the zip of his trousers. If he's not stroking a breast, he's stroking a thigh. If he's not stroking a thigh, he's stroking himself. In short, Pedro is a perve. He likes it any which way he can, though he makes it clear that he hasn't the stomach for "faggots".

Pedro, a white boy with "eight inches of solid steel", tells us that "a disgusting bathroom is no big deal because that's the way it is with blacks." Then he glibly confides that he has to wait years before selflessly performing cunnilingus because "blacks who are very dark always have an acrid smell." But perhaps Gutierrez's worst feat of racial stereotyping is to make his black male characters inarticulate beings with "those huge pricks that might tear out your insides." That they are freakshow attractions and morons doesn't really help matters.

Neither does the monotonous way that Pedro Juan threads together the series of misadventures through which he evokes the miserable grind that is daily life in Havana. The narrator slides into formulaic, repetitious vignettes that inevitably end in petty crime, nihilistic observations and rugged, emotionless copulation. Where he scores a modest amount of points is in his depiction of the ingenious hustles that the have-nots find to make ends meet. A young boy called Formula One, who stunt-rides a bicycle for bets, is an excellent vehicle for humour. As are Pedro Juan's stints as a lobster salesman, and his tangles with the public health service.

But ultimately these are indistinct moments of light in an unremittingly dark work that is woefully profligate in its handling of the complexities of both race and class in the Caribbean. If Gutierrez's aim is to show the seamy flip-side of Castro's republic, then he's done so at the cost of dehumanising his characters, nastily exploiting the squirm factor of destitution. Cuba may have stomach-turning squalor, but it also has a vibrant soul and an effortless sensuality. Dirty Havana Trilogy, for all its sweat, sex, rum and picaresque pretensions, has neither. *