Brooklyn’s
wake came
Dublin
and D.C.,
Chicago
and
Baltimore,
Los
Angeles,
San
Francisco,
London,
Miami
and
Manhattan.
In the three quick years since the series debuted, even the Twin
Cities got their own shady collection, as did Wall Street. And
if Queens Noir is just around the corner (January),
Bronx Noir is on stands right this minute, aflame with its
customary burn.
Well, Noir
fans, Akashic’s back in the utter black, and this time
they’ve gone neither ’cross pond nor ’cross country, but ’cross
a little waterway we like to call the Florida Straits.
I mean:
Havana
Noir.
And they mean
it more.
The they, of
course, are the dark-minded scribes behind the Havana edition of
Akashic’s shadow run: Leonardo Padura, Pablo Medina, Alex Abella,
Arturo Arango, Lea Aschkenas, Moises Asis, Carolina
Garcia-Aguilera and about a dozen others, including Achy Obejas,
who not only contributed to the volume (“Zenzizenzic”), she
edited it as well.
And oh what a
keen, clean edit it is. Like the naming of her story, this is
editing raised to the fourth power; unlike the root of the name,
however (“zenzic” means, literally, “the square of a number”),
these tales are anything but box-like. Unless you count the
amount of sharp angles and shadowed corners contained in their
midst.
Make that
angled elbows, thrown from the blindside alleys of each and
every neighborhood there is, among them Portela (Ena Lucia’s
"The Last Passenger"), Vibora (Michel Encinosa Fu’s "What for,
This Burden"), Cojimar (Oscar F. Ortiz’s "Settling of Scores"),
Old Town (Miguel Mejides’s "Nowhere Man") and Centro Habana
itself (Lea Aschkenas’s "La Coca-Cola del Olvido"). Yet as
depthed in the cobblestone streets of the Cuban capital as is
this torrent of stories, rest assured it’s no mere tour guide;
in fact, it’d make casual visitors completely rearrange their
itineraries.
Not me, though.
And probably not you, either. I like life dark, I like life
shady and I like life where the sun only sets on hard-won
secrets. That means I like Havana Noir, deep to the
marrow of my troubled soul. Doesn’t matter that I’ve not yet
even swung the town; I’m a Miami boy, and Havana’s always been
up close and personally accounted for. Hell, the way these tales
swing, I could be an Icelander and still dig the heat.
But whether or
not you’ve been raised on tropical tales of gangsters and
balseros, rum-runners and revolutionaries, shortage and
affluence and subterfuge, you’ll wanna get with this vivid trip.
And — get this — you won’t even need a visa.
Achy Obejas
reads from and discusses
Havana Noir
at
