La imagen de la nostalgia en Pasado perfecto de Leonardo Padura

Abstract

This study examines the novel by Leonardo Padura, Pasado perfecto (1991), and considers the image of nostalgia exhibited in this text, which initiates a series of police novels with detective Mario Conde as the protagonist. This article proposes that the image of nostalgia, interconnected with categories of loss and discontent, functions as the organizing principle of this novel. Therefore, it constitutes a fundamental feature of the ethical-existential and ideological characterization of the protagonist. This analysis recognizes the internal mechanisms of nostalgia in the novel and assesses their link with Padura’s esthetic and ideological project, which converges in a critical diagnosis of the social environment of Cuba where the author has lived. In this way, the image of nostalgia in Pasado perfecto is connected with iconoclastic impulses that challenge the practices, knowledge, and discourses that structure the officially institutionalized history. Consequently, the nostalgic imagination acquires an ethical dimension by reclaiming relationships and communities that could have been.