Biography Essay

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, recipient of the coveted Cervantes Prize awarded annually to the best living Spanish language writer, is a Londoner whose heart is in Havana. Off to an early start, he published short stories, became a literary ghost editor, founded a literary journal, cofounded a literary society, and spent time in jail for the use of profanity in a publication, all by the time he was twenty-three years old. A man whose personal style and political views have been controversial, Cabrera Infante's literature has proven even more provocative. With a style that fits no current mold, he seems to amuse the majority of his readers but cajoles and perplexes the critics. Compared more often with writers such as Petronius, Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce than with Latin American contemporaries, Cabrera Infante is nonetheless in the vanguard of new Latin American fiction...