Search - List of Books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
"I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book." -- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante (; 22 April 1929 – 21 February 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín.
A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally "three sad tigers", but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses.
"A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.""American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.""But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.""For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.""For me, words are just words, nothing else.""I am a writer of fragments.""I am against the notion of style in itself.""I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.""I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.""I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.""I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.""I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.""I don't have any style.""I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.""I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.""I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.""I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write - I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it.""I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.""I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.""I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course.""I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.""I think all writing is done through memory.""I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.""I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.""I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.""I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.""I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic.""I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.""If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror.""It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.""Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.""My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.""My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.""No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.""Puns are a form of humor with words.""So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.""That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.""The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.""There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.""Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title.""Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.""Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.""What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.""When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.""When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.""Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.""You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that."
Born in Gibara in Cuba's former Oriente Province (now part of Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party.
Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at he University of Havana.
An Interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante Center for book culture An appreciation of Guillermo Cabrera Infante by Dionisio D. Martínez Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term.
He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine Carteles, using the pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución, a supplement to the Communist newspaper Revolución; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by Fidel Castro.
He divorced in 1961 and in the same year married his second wife, Miriam Gomez, an actress. Having fallen somewhat out of favor with the Castro regime (the government's ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to his being forbidden to publish in Cuba), he served from 1962 to 1965 in Brussels, Belgium, as a cultural attaché. During this time, his sentiments turned against the Castro regime; after returning to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, he went into exile, first in Madrid, then in London.
In 1966 he published Tres Tristes Tigres, a highly experimental, Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which intended to do for Cuban Spanish what Mark Twain had done for American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations.
It is little known that Guillermo Cabrera Infante was the Guillermo Caín who co-wrote the script for the 1971 cult film Vanishing Point.
Although he is considered a part of the famed Latin American "Boom" generation of writers that includes his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, he disdained the label. Always the iconoclast, he even rejected the label "novel" for his masterpieces, such as Tres Tristes Tigres and La Habana para un infante difunto.
In 1997 he received the Premio Cervantes, presented to him by the King Juan Carlos of Spain.
He died on February 21, 2005, in London, of septicemia. He had two daughters by his first marriage.
Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960, "In peace as in war")
Twentieth Century Job (1963, film reviews)
Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1964, novel, published in English as "A View of Dawn in the Tropics")
Tres Tristes Tigres (1967, novel, published in English as Three Trapped Tigers; the original title refers to a Spanish-language tongue-twister, and literally means "Three Sad Tigers"); portions of this were later republished as Ella cantaba boleros
Exorcismos de esti(l)o (1976, novel, "Exorcisms of style"; estilo means style and estío, summertime)
La Habana para un Infante Difunto (1979, memoir, published in English as Infante's Inferno; the Spanish title is a pun on "Pavane pour une infante defunte", title of a piano piece by Maurice Ravel)
Holy Smoke, 1985 (in English, later translated into Spanish as Puro Humo)
Delito por bailar el chachachá, 1995 (in English: Guilty of Dancing the ChaChaCha, 2001, translated by himself)
Cine o sardina (1997, "Cinema or sardine")
Vidas para leerlas (1998, essays, "Lives to be read")
Arcadia todas las noches ("Arcadia every night")
Mea Cuba (1991, political essays, the title means "Cuba Pisses" or "Cuba is Pissing" and is a pun on "Mea Culpa")
Infantería (title is a pun on his name and the Spanish for "infantry")
Cabrera Infante also translated James Joyce's Dubliners into Spanish (1972) and wrote screenplays, including Vanishing Point and the adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.
