From Leonardo Padura--whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario
Conde form the basis of Netflix's Four Seasons in Havana--The
Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery
spanning centuries of occult history.
Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to
show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a
decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban
Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan
worship of money.
Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant
practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track
down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla--a black Madonna. This sets
Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the
distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to
uncover the true provenance of the statue.
Through vignettes from the life of a Catalan peasant named Antoni
Barral, who appears throughout history in different guises--as a
shepherd during the Spanish Civil War, as vassal to a feudal lord--we
trace the Madonna to present-day Cuba. With Barral serving as Conde's
alter ego, unstuck in time, and Conde serving as the author's, we are
treated to a panorama of history, and reminded of the impossibility of
ever remaining on its sidelines, no matter how obscure we may think our
places in the action.
Equal parts The Name of the Rose and The Maltese Falcon, The
Transparency of Time cements Leonardo Padura's position as the
preeminent literary crime writer of our time.
