Infante’s Inferno (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
- First Published: 1979
- Type of Plot: Fictional autobiography
- Time of Work: The 1940’s
- Setting: Havana, Cuba
- Principal Characters: The narrator, Zoila, Juliet Estévez, Honey Hawthorne, Margarita del Campo (Violeta del Valle)
- Genres: Long fiction, Autobiographical fiction
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Acting or actors, Sex or sexuality, 1940’s, Cuba or Cubans, Films, movies, or motion pictures
- Locales: Havana, Cuba
The Novel
Cabrera Infante’s inferno centers on women or, rather, on their ultimate inaccessibility even when attainable. The twelve-year-old narrator, an Alexander Portnoy avant la lettre, dreams about love and cerebrates about sex in a rumpled, one-room tenement apartment. His father, one of the founders of the clandestine Cuban Communist Party, has recently moved the family to Havana and there started to work in the newly created party newspaper, Hoy. It is 1941, and the spindly adolescent has the impression that he has died and gone to heaven. He is...
[The entire page is 2654 words long]
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