Leonardo Padura Fuentes' Adiós Hemingway

I was in the mood for some fiction, and had heard about Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who writes crime fiction/mysteries. I bought Adiós Hemingway, the first to be translated into English. His main character is detective Mario Conde, a self-proclaimed bibliophile, aspiring writer and former cop. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and definitely will read more of his work.

A caveat, though—if you are not interested in Ernest Hemingway, then the book may not be for you. You don’t have to like Hemingway. In fact, one of the book’s themes is Conde’s ambivalence between his love of Hemingway’s writing and his intense dislike of him as an individual (though ultimately even that hatred is eroded a bit). The plot centers on a body discovered at Hemingway’s Finca Vigía, and goes back and forth between Conde’s investigation and a recreation of 1958, just before Hemingway left Cuba for good and while he is undergoing a severe personal crisis that ultimately led to suicide. I won’t say much about it to avoid spoilers, but one of the main questions is whether the FBI was after Hemingway.

One reason Conde dislikes Hemingway, and distrusts the Cuban fascination with him, is that he was an icon in the country, and lived there off and on for many years, yet knew nothing about it: “more than twenty years living alongside Cubans were not enough for the artist to understand a damned thing about their island” (pp. 46-47). However, he also comes to pity him and, to an extent, even identify with him.