Happy Monday friends! I hope you packed light and got some party clothes, cause this Monday we are in the Latin America and in the heavy and crazy Havana!
So today we are in CUBA and we will explore:
THREE SAD TIGERS BY GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE
Guillermo Cabrera Infante (22 April 1929 – 21 February 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, screenwriter, 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", published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses. He was influential to Puerto Rican and Cuban writers such as Luis Rafael Sánchez (La guaracha del Macho Camacho) and Fernando Velázquez Medina (Última rumba en La Habana).
Three Sad (Trapped) Tigers:
Themes:
The hard life in Cuba, the poverty and the never ending struggles of artist life.
I haven't read this book yet, but it sounds amazing! I love Remarque books, so I have a hunch this novel is something similar to that. So I cannot wait to read it it goes right up in my TBR list for March.
And I believe this book through this representation of the night life of Havana, represents the entire society and social structure of Cuba and how people had to live or still lives there till this say.
The plot of Three Trapped Tigers is conceived as a nightclub
show, introduced by the frenetic multilingual wordplay of the emcee of
the famous Tropicana cabaret in Havana.
His first word is “Showtime!”; his last ones are “Curtains up!” At this point a number of characters, some of them present in the club and introduced by the emcee, narrate sections of the text, with no further introduction or explanation. There is a one-sided telephone conversation, a letter, a story appearing as a series of fragments placed at various points in the text, and another story in two translations (only in the Spanish original) and complete with “corrections” by the author’s wife, who turns out to be a fictional creation of her husband. There are even fragments of a woman’s sessions with a psychiatrist.
The author has said that the text consists of a series of “voices,” and that voices have no biography, which means that the only possible coherence results from the reader’s ability to assemble the fragments into a more or less meaningful whole.
His first word is “Showtime!”; his last ones are “Curtains up!” At this point a number of characters, some of them present in the club and introduced by the emcee, narrate sections of the text, with no further introduction or explanation. There is a one-sided telephone conversation, a letter, a story appearing as a series of fragments placed at various points in the text, and another story in two translations (only in the Spanish original) and complete with “corrections” by the author’s wife, who turns out to be a fictional creation of her husband. There are even fragments of a woman’s sessions with a psychiatrist.
The author has said that the text consists of a series of “voices,” and that voices have no biography, which means that the only possible coherence results from the reader’s ability to assemble the fragments into a more or less meaningful whole.
Themes:
The hard life in Cuba, the poverty and the never ending struggles of artist life.
Thoughts:
And I believe this book through this representation of the night life of Havana, represents the entire society and social structure of Cuba and how people had to live or still lives there till this say.
See you next Monday!
