"I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels"
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“I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels” is the kind of line that smuggles a manifesto inside a shrug. Cabrera Infante isn’t being coy; he’s throwing a lit match at a category that wants to domesticate him. “Assiduously” is the tell: this isn’t a casual preference but a sustained campaign against being shelved, summarized, and sold as a stable product called the novel.
The intent is partly aesthetic. Cabrera Infante’s work (especially Tres tristes tigres) behaves like a city at night: voices overlap, jokes ricochet, slang mutates, plots dissolve into riffs. Calling that a “novel” would imply the usual contract - character arcs, narrative transparency, a sense that language is merely the delivery system. His subtext is that language is the event. If the book’s real action is in puns, rhythm, mishearings, and cultural detritus, then “novel” becomes an undersized label, a genre straightjacket.
The context is also political, and the politics run through form. Exile, censorship, and the contested story of post-revolutionary Cuba made official narratives suspect. Refusing “novel” is a refusal of tidy legibility: the kind states and markets both prefer. It’s a sly, writerly way of saying: don’t expect an orderly nation here, or an orderly book. Expect a counter-archive - funny, abrasive, polyphonic - where the point is precisely what can’t be smoothly classified.
The intent is partly aesthetic. Cabrera Infante’s work (especially Tres tristes tigres) behaves like a city at night: voices overlap, jokes ricochet, slang mutates, plots dissolve into riffs. Calling that a “novel” would imply the usual contract - character arcs, narrative transparency, a sense that language is merely the delivery system. His subtext is that language is the event. If the book’s real action is in puns, rhythm, mishearings, and cultural detritus, then “novel” becomes an undersized label, a genre straightjacket.
The context is also political, and the politics run through form. Exile, censorship, and the contested story of post-revolutionary Cuba made official narratives suspect. Refusing “novel” is a refusal of tidy legibility: the kind states and markets both prefer. It’s a sly, writerly way of saying: don’t expect an orderly nation here, or an orderly book. Expect a counter-archive - funny, abrasive, polyphonic - where the point is precisely what can’t be smoothly classified.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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