SOURCE: "Nabokov/Cabrera Infante: True Imaginary Lies," in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 559-67.

In the following essay, Oviedo explores "connections and convergences" between Cabrera Infante's work and that of Vladimir Nabokov.

Around 1970, in the prologue to his collection of essays Extraterritorial, George Steiner recognized that the language revolution that immediately preceded and followed World War I—particularly in Central Europe—had produced among certain contemporary writers a phenomenon which he called unhousedness, a term we could paraphrase as "linguistic uprooting." Almost as if they had lost their sense of a center, these writers, to a greater or lesser degree, passed through various languages, making their relation to them a major theme of their works. Having fled the "maternal house" of their own language, they came to dwell precariously in an "international hotel" of languages containing many rooms, entrances, and exits. Steiner chose three authors—Nabokov...