We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

“Being brave and seeking fun in rough conditions” could be the subtitle of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy, a novel about a former journalist pulling himself up by the bootstraps in modern-day Havana. In prose that sounds a little like Henry Miller and a little like Charles Bukowski—that is to say, vivid and slightly dirty and always truthful—Gutiérrez records the escapades of his hero chapter by chapter until the power of the stories equals way more than the sum of its parts.

If you’ve ever cocked an eye at a certain Caribbean region of the map and wondered what life is like on that island between Miami and Jamaica, Dirty Havana Trilogy is as close as you can get to visiting without doing anything illegal. Needless to say, the book is banned in its country of origin. Seek it out and count your blessings.

My parents allowed me to read anything in the house. If it was on the bookshelf, it was fair game. This is how I learned many things: how to cuss, how to use the dictionary as a demystifying tool, how to develop a distinct taste in literature.

The cussing part came courtesy of Charles Bukowski, the poet and novelist deemed by Time to be the “laureate of American lowlife”. His books were on the shelf because they were good, for one thing, but also because Bukowski was a compadre of my grandfather’s. I don’t think either of my parents dipped into the stash of novels and poetry often, but I sure did: the stories were rough, plainspoken and filled with salacious details and philosophical tangling. It helped that the volumes, all published by Black Sparrow, had remarkably cool covers.

I started with 1971’s Post Office and, since it suited my tastes, moved on to 1982’s Ham on Rye. From there, it was a short hop to the writer’s accessible poems and letters. Any way I came at it, an hour spent reading Bukowski was an hour spent inside the mind of the dirtiest (and cleverest) old man I’d ever met.

If my parents only knew.