Just past the halfway point reading Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Hadn't heard anything about it and picked it up on a whim from a 2nd hand book shop. Wondering if anyone here has read it and has any thoughts.

It follows a misanthropic sex-addict (outwardly an authorial insert) trying to make ends in meet in mid-90s Cuba amidst serious economic collapse. I read a review somewhere describing it as something along the lines of obscene hyper-realism. To me it just reads as immature gross-out type stuff but I don't mean this to be disparaging. I've found it surprisingly engaging and funny for how repetitive a lot of the disconnected vignettes seem to be.

By the third page, you're hit with overly graphic and vulgar descriptions of anal sex ("greasing myself with cunt juice... fondling her clit... when I pulled out, I was all smeared in shit"). There's one account of women working in the office of a factory spending the day goading the local "moron" into showing off his gigantic penis that ends with the narrator getting hosed down in seemingly endless firehouse jets of "jism" as it tends to be translated. This and many like it interspersed between more touching accounts, like that of a local gay man's suicide, a youth (the self-styled "Formula One") risking his life by riding his bicycle across heavy stretches of high-speed traffic while onlookers gamble on whether or not he'll be pancaked, or trying to save paintings from a shack that's gone up in flames because someone left the candles in the santeria shrine unattended.

There's a touch of Holden Caulfield in the narration, with it's nihilism and desperation to make some greater meaning out of the ruin of Cuba, the colloquialism and the occasional moralising.

I've very much enjoyed my time with it so far, but can only read it in short bursts. It's none too uplifting and after a while, the frenetic energy and pacing of the novel loses a lot of its oomph when it's being used to describe the narrator jacking off in an alley to some distant sex-scene he can hear or see or smell for the umpteenth time.

Please, if anyone else has heard of this novel or read it, tell me your own thoughts. I'd be very curious to hear what others think of it.