Os espaços da cidade no romance O Rabo da Serpente, de Leonardo Padura

Abstract

Since its beginnings, with the works of Edgar Allan Poe and other writers, crime fiction has been a genre which usually displays the relations between the characters and the cities where they live. The environment makes possible the apprehension of both the inner self of the characters and the dichotomy between the good and the evil, which is also common in crime fiction and reflects a macrostructure. Cities reveal the way the characters think and their very attitudes within the novel. Out of that condition, we analyse the novel The Snake’s Tail, by the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura. The investigation takes into consideration the representation of the space (Havana) in the novel, in order to understand thecharacteristics of the very space and how it is shared between locals and “foreigners” (the Chinese community who lives in the Cuban capital city). Such elements are employed by the author both to construct the characters and to recover past moments.