Volume 31, Number 11 · June 28, 1984
Odor and Ardor
By Michael Wood
Infante's Inferno
by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine with the author
Harper and Row, 410 pp., $18.95
'Any resemblance between literature and history,' Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote some years ago, 'is accidental.' He meant, of course, to offer the familiar disclaimer of fiction, particularly since his novel Three Trapped Tigers (1967), the work to which the remark was attached, mixed the names of living persons with those of transposed or invented characters: a Havana hodgepodge. But he also meant to offer a provocation, a sly and long-armed distinction. History for Cabrera is the domain of power and preening ambition, a nightmare into which countless people can't wait to hurl themselves, and from which many will escape only into death. Is there such a thing, he wondered in an article published last year in the Mexican magazine Vuelta, as 'the tedium of power,' a weariness of history's heights? The question was rhetorical since he was suggesting that suicide has become a political ideology in Cuba, the result of a combination of hubris and disappointment. 'Absolute power disillusions absolutely.'
Review, 2652 words
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