SOURCE: "The Mind's Isle: An Introduction to Cabrera Infante," in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, p. 512.]

In the following essay, Davis offers a short introduction to the study of Cabrera Infante's work with reference to several other writers, most notably James Joyce.

As the twentieth century draws to an uneasy close, we can begin to consider the novels, poems, movies, music, architecture, and celebrations that are its artifacts, and we are immediately struck by the persistence of memory (to steal a phrase from Dalí). As our understanding of history has become fainter, our dependence upon interior history, memory, has grown more obsessive. [Cabrera Infante] might be called the Bach of memory, and each of his texts adds variations to the central fugue. Borges, in a poem that re-creates the house of his childhood ("Androgué"), calls memory the fourth dimension, and it is into this realm that we...