Art & Creativity Quote by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cabrera Infante is needling the most powerful character in publishing: the label. By calling his works simply “books,” he’s claiming a writer’s prerogative to define the object on the page without surrendering to the market’s taxonomy. “Novel” is not a neutral descriptor here; it’s a sales category, a shelving instruction, a promise to readers that what they’re buying will behave in familiar ways. His sentence stages a small tug-of-war between aesthetic ambition and commercial convenience, and he makes it funny by phrasing it like a minor correction that keeps being ignored.

The subtext is sharper: his writing often refuses the obedient arcs of plot and psychological realism that “novel” implies. Cabrera Infante’s most famous work, Tres tristes tigres, is built from linguistic fireworks, collage, Havana nightlife, and punning performance. Calling that a “novel” can feel like calling jazz “background music” because the restaurant needs a genre on the menu. “Books” leaves room for hybridity: memoir, satire, oral history, wordplay, political lament, all at once.

Context matters because Cabrera Infante’s career is inseparable from displacement. A Cuban writer in exile, translated and exported, he’s also being packaged for foreign audiences who want “Latin American novels” as a recognizable product. His publishers “insist” because institutions insist: prizes, reviewers, bookstores, and immigration-era cultural branding all reward clean categories. The line lands as a wry protest against that smoothing. It’s not modesty; it’s a refusal to let the industry’s nouns domesticate what the work is trying to do.