Word: cabrera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...CABRERA INFANTE 487 pages. Harper...
...worst case of the Marx blathers on record, but that he is a Cuban, and wrote it all first in Spanish. His novel, a brilliantly loony memoir of life in Havana just before Castro's takeover, was called Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers) in the original. When Cabrera Infante and a couple of steady-nerved friends did the English transmogrification of TTT, the tongue twisting of the title seemed more important than its negligible sense, and so the tigers were trapped...
...sound like a fairly good grade of college humor, but it is a good deal more: the fond, wondering recollection of a double exile, a man separated by circumstance from his country and by a decade and more from his youth. (Author Cabrera Infante, 42, is a leftist who regards Castro as a Stalinist and a gangster, and now lives in London.) His book is a remarkably good novel of memory, and it is memory that splits the images and works the magnifications, producing the prose pratfalls, the crosscutting of parody and boozy interior monologue, the bits of trivia...