SOURCE: “Bad Art and Good Intentions,” in The Nation, New York, Vol. 227, No. 15, November 4, 1978, pp. 477-78.

In the following review, Pardo faults Cabrera Infante's use of the prose vignette form in View of Dawn in the Tropics.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante's new book, View of Dawn in the Tropics, is a curious example of what can happen when a writer returns to the scenes of his early successes. His admirers will look in vain for the freshness and charm of his first book of short stories or the wild and sometimes exciting verbal experimentation of his first novel. This collection of 101 historical vignettes, printed on 145 largely empty pages, is an attempt, Micheneresque in its audacity and Hemingwayesque in the laconism of its style, to tell the story of Cuba from its geological formation to the present day and for all eternity, but it succeeds only in making one wonder...