Discoveries

Adios Hemingway

A Novel

Leonardo Padura Fuentes, translated from the Spanish by John King

Canongate Books: 240 pp., $20

This moody Cuban novel opens in the shade of the casuarina trees by a sleepy cove near La Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s home in Havana. Mario Conde, eight years off the police force, remembers back 40 years to when he was a child of 5 and watched Hemingway disembark from a beautiful yacht and climb into a shiny black Chrysler quayside. Conde grew up to be a writer, a detective and a bibliophile, not as smitten with the Hemingway myth as some he knew, but fascinated.

So when a body is exhumed in the backyard of La Finca Vigia, a fellow cop gives him a chance to prove Hemingway innocent before announcing to the world that the writer was a common murderer.

La Finca Vigia is, in many ways, the most compelling character in the novel, with its views of Havana, its cockfighting ring in the backyard under the mango tree, the trophies and books that line the walls and the artillery (from handguns to a Thompson machine gun) still hidden in its closets. This is a salty, fast novel, written around an obsession that has swamped lesser writers.

*

The Foundling

A Novel

Charlotte Bronte

Hesperus Classics: 112 pp., $13 paper

Never before published, this fantasy, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1833 when she was just 17 years old, is essentially a brilliant example of young-adult literature in the 1800s. Bronte, the daughter of a curate, stayed home perhaps as much as Emily Dickinson, but her imagination stowed away and walked the gangplank with the best of the swashbucklers.

“The Foundling” is the story of a young changeling, Edward Sydney, who leaves his complacent parents at home in England knitting and reading religious texts and sails for the African city of Verdopolis. Verdopolis, a mythical city of domes, sea breezes, silver and porticos, is also a place where spectators watch as children are murdered in the streets for sport. Edward gets into scrapes, is called to account for his lineage and lives happily ever after. The book skips merrily along like something by Voltaire:

“We were all dressing and getting ready to go to Viscount Cavendish’s boat party, when Sylvius began boasting, and saying how much prettier his salmon-colored coat and dead-white trousers were than Alsana’s apple green and French white ones. So Alsana told him that he had no more taste than the washstand, or else he would never dress himself in such vulgar rags, and besides that, his complexion was so horrid that he ought to dress himself in sackcloth and wear ashes on his head. And then Silvius began to cry, and he cried so long that Alsana pretended to be sorry for him.”

Here is a pre-TV, pre-computer imagination that is livelier and stranger than anything a screen can offer.

*

Midnight’s Gate

Essays

Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Matthew Fryslie

New Directions: 272 pp.,

$19.95 paper

“In my wandering overseas, alcohol has been my most loyal companion.” That line, which begins a section on the drinking habits in various parts of Europe, is more flip and more self-indulgent than most of the poet’s gentle, haunting observations of the places he has traveled to since his exile from China in 1989, but it is typical of his tendency to surprise his readers just when they start to trust his observations wholeheartedly.

Bei Dao was 40 years old when he left China. He has lived in seven countries since then, and he is a committed member of the international community of poets and writers; many of these essays offer insights into the world of PEN meetings, writers’ conferences and that border world between literature and politics.

He writes with an exile’s floating eye of New York’s moon looming up between buildings; of the spectral light in Paris rising from the winding streets, the river and the streetlamps; of the girls in Prague, with their “earthy beauty often extinguished by modernization.”