[In the following review, Eaves critiques Writes of Passage, a translation of a story collection first published in Cuba in 1960, as "repackaging."]

"Language is my business", writes G. Cabrera Infante in an explanatory epilogue to this, his first book of short stories, published in Havana in 1960 but hitherto unavailable in Britain. The Chandleresque pose may be safely assumed to be ironic: language, as far as Batista's secret police were concerned in 1952, when the literary journal Bohemia carried a short story called "A Ballad of Bullets and Bull's Eyes", is also trouble; and the author's description of his detention inside El Principé Castle prison, for publishing a fiction peppered with "English profanities", is chilling. Banged up with a group of veteran rebel detainees, Infante finds his story—about a botched assassination attempt—has been taken literally by the convicts who upbraid him for its inaccuracies: "You don't know what you're talking about, man. That's not how you go about knocking off the opposition."

The "Ballad' itself seems almost unremarkable, as do many suppressed literary texts after the context of suppression has changed. A posse of political thugs sets up a routine murder which goes wrong when an innocent man is shot. Their only misgivings are over the amount of time wasted. In the build-up to the bathetic bullet, police officers and drifters track in and out of shot—Infante the screen dramatist is never far away—and a drunk, American tourist sings an obscene ditty before waddling away into the night. It is, Infante implies, pointless looking for any special degeneracy; the real offence, committed equally by convicts and the secret police, lies in denying a fiction its right to connote rather than denote. In this kind of closed mythology, everything must refer (and defer) to one thing: the state or the self. The problem is that Infante himself is implicated in this monomania, or "imprisoned by his own myth" as he might put it. The island of Cuba, that territorial expression of the ego from which there is no escape, brings him home every time on its "immovable raft".

The island is the anti-hero of the collection. A sense of the geographically implacable under-pins each story. In the first, "Gobegger Foriu Tostay"; a six-year-old girl prattles artlessly as her family faces eviction and her sister, Marieantonieta, resorts to prostitution to save the home. Terrible passions are caught up in the naming spree of infantile observation and Infante's camera weighs elation and dejection alike with the same photographic rigour.

Yet the family stays in place—an irony Infante makes sure we do not forget, and a frustrated pose which the best story, "Josefina, Take Good Care of the Senores", turns into paralysis. Its narrator, a ghastly madame equal parts Grendel and Sweet Sue, gushes puns and malapropisms in praise of her prize whore, the permanently sedated amputee, Josefina. Popularity with a US senator guarantees Josefina's continued employment, but her choices are circumscribed by disaster. She cannot move from her bed and has gone mad after aborting a monstrous foetus. Even so, notes the madame, "she came to be called Josefina of her own violation".

Other stories seek to relieve the tension of island-bound immobility. A woman in desperate straits, hemmed in by her abusive brothers, wrecks her house chasing flies. Parched with thirst and anger, she is revived by a storm—relief rainfall; of course—and finds a fly dead in a glass of milk. In another narrative of interrupted cadences, an English teacher strips naked for her student before resuming instruction. There are also rites of passage dealing with familiar, comic themes of adolescence and infatuation, although these, too, are fretted with yearning: "All I wanted", murmurs a lovesick medical student, "was memory, the fragrance of memory."

One sympathizes. Like his miraculous narrative collage View of Dawn in the Tropics, Infante's Writes of Passage is essentially a photo-album of culture and memory stuck in the developing tray. There seems no way off the island of image reproduction; nothing really develops at all. And yet Infante exerts himself to break out of the photographic background with word-play that announces his continuing proficiency as a virile linguist. This would be fine if he did not also acknowledge the age of these stories in an introduction which snubs literature without pedigree: "I, who used to search and devour, read so very few modern novels. Otherwise I'd have to use a stomach pump." Language is Infante's business, no doubt of that. But is repackaging?