INFANTE'S INFERNO
I found the best book this weekend. Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote one of my favoritest books ever, Three Trapped Tigers, a kind of American-Graffiti-set-in-pre-revolutionary-Cuba, filtered through a healthy amount of Joycean wordplay and bawdy wit. It's in and out of print (far as I can tell it's currently in, so if you have a notion, go get it), and I liked it so much I named my first real band for it.

Anyway, he now lives in London, an exile disillusioned by the totalitarian turns Castro's made in the past few decades. He continues to write, both journalistic pieces and fictions, mostly Calvino-esque exercises in wordplay instead of narrative, but his early stuff continues to amaze me.

And on my last trip to the library, I found Writes Of Passage, his first published book, a collection of short stories in which you can really see him stretching his voice in all kinds of different directions, from the breathless and then this happened and oh yeah this was going on and then she said that of the opening piece through a suffocatingly sophisticated discussion about jazz with an effete bad artiste, with stops at bordellos and cantinas all along the Havana coast. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, and I'm enjoying it like a five fucking dollar milkshake.