SOURCE: A review of A Twentieth-Century Job, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, p. 15.

In the following review, Elliott takes exception to aspects of A Twentieth-Century Job, but commends the book as a rare collection of reviews that one can read "in large gulps."

American film reviewing has widely become a fandango of fools, of wagging thumbs and swaggering blurbs. Guillermo Cabrera Infante's A Twentieth-Century Job arrives like a bottle tossed into the ocean of film 30 years ago, one with a message for anyone not taking their film pleasures seriously: Wake up, stupid.

This bracingly smart ensemble of reviews is from the Cuban novelist who since the 1960s has lived in London in voluntary exile from the land of The Beard. As a young intellectual, Infante, now 63, planted this garden of barbed flowers during the waning Batista era, and then briefly during the ruddy dawn of Castro...