Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Two Islands, Many Worlds
A native Cuban who has lived in London since 1966, Guillermo Cabrera Infante is, in every sense, a multilingual and multicultural author. Equally at ease in both Spanish and English, he has distinguished himself with daring and innovative novels, essays, short stories, and film scripts written in both languages. His work has won major literary awards in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in the United States.
This biography is the first comprehensive exploration of the life and works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with the author and his family and friends, as well as extensive study of both published and unpublished works, Raymond D. Souza creates an intimate portrait of Cabrera Infante and the cultural and political milieus that shaped his writing, including Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres), View of Dawn in the Tropics (Vista del amanecer en el trópico), Infante's Inferno (La Habana para un Infante difunto), Holy Smoke, A Twentieth Century Job (Un oficio del siglo XX), Writes of Passage (Así en la paz como en la guerra), and Mea Cuba.
This book shines in the details; Souza had his subject's cooperation, and some periods in the author's life have now been filled in with information that goes beyond mere word play. . . . at times, one has the impression of eavesdropping in the writer's London apartment. Those interested in the writer's craft will find useful information on his short stories, creative process, and film scripts that have played such an important role in his career.
This is the work on Guillermo Cabrera Infante that I would recommend to the
non-specialist. . . . Quite simply, it will be by far the most important book to date on
this author
- Preface
- 1. A Distant Place
- 2. A Room Without a View
- 3. A Momentary Splendor
- 4. The Apprentice Storyteller
- 5. Citizen Cain
- 6. The Elusive Tiger
- 7. A Nocturnal Rhapsody
- 8. Lowry’s Ghost
- 9. Images of History
- 10. The Vertigo of Memory
- 11. The Demonic Heart of Nature
- 12. The Essayistic Narrator
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Photographs