He is best known for the successful thriller series starring Mario Conde in which, since 1991 and in nine volumes, he has been weaving a living chronicle of contemporary Cuban society.
And for many, this writer born in 1955 in Havana in the Mantilla district – where he still lives – is the greatest Cuban writer of his generation. The amplitude of his work and his complex humanity bear witness to this.
Often, says Leonardo Padura in one of the autobiographical texts of Water everywherea slightly disparate collection of unpublished texts in French, foreign journalists ask him why he chose to stay in Cuba, when he could no doubt have chosen to live elsewhere.
To ask this question is to not have understood that the island is its raw material. “I am a Cuban writer who lives and writes in Cuba because I cannot and do not want to be anything else, and despite the most diverse difficulties, I insist, I need Cuba to live and write. To continue to live with his nostalgia, his memories and his frustrations.
No wonder, then, that the writer still lives in the house where he was born, on the outskirts of Havana. The same neighborhood “without particular charm” and far from the sea where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were also born.
prison without bars
An island both favored and abused by history, Cuba is a “country larger than its geography”, believes Padura, who remains aware of what he calls “the accursed circumstance of water everywhere”, in reference to a verse by the poet Virgilio Piñera. Its insularity, symbolized by “the stone snake of the Malecón”, makes it a kind of prison without bars – long before the reality of the Castro regime.
Padura rails there against the reggaeton which tortures him, “music of lasciviousness and alienation, of bewilderment and fighting”, fully assumes “his vice of pelota” (baseball) or gives a presentation on the Cuban literature (he was, at the beginning of his career, a literary journalist and critic), paying his debts to Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, “the two most important writers of Cuban literature of the XXe century “.
In a country marked by social and political constraints, by shortcomings of all kinds, the art of “solving” (resolving), he also explains to us, has become at the same time a philosophy, a religion and a mode of survival.
In addition to reflecting on the raison d’être of the novel and on Cuban literature, Padura tells us about the genesis of some of his novels, addressing, among other things, the birth of his detective series and the writing of his works. The man who loved dogs (2011) and Heretics (2014), which traced the fate of a Jewish family between the Netherlands of the 17e century until Havana of the XXe century.
These are some of the subjects that come to irrigate Water everywheresubtitle Living and writing in Cuba. A vibrant profession of faith in literature and Cubanism.