The Transparency of Time: A Novel (Mario Conde Investigates, 9)

Padura, Leonardo

ISBN 10: 0374277958 / ISBN 13: 9780374277956

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Gently used with minimal wear on the corners and cover. A few pages may contain light highlighting or writing, but the text remains fully legible. Dust jacket may be missing, and supplemental materials like CDs or codes may not be included. May be ex-library with library markings. Ships promptly! Seller Inventory # 4EKGU900CFPT_ns

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author: Leonardo Padura was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1955. Author of The Man Who Loved Dogs and Heretics, his genre-bending literary crime novels featuring detective Mario Conde have been widely translated and form the basis for Netflix’s 2016 miniseries, Four Seasons in Havana.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Transparency of Time: A Novel (Mario ...
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: good