While Cabrera Infante does not share [Julio] Cortázar's didactic attitude toward literature, their texts, Tres tristes tigres and Rayuela, are remarkably similar in that they overwhelm the reader with an avalanche of fragments, pieces which only cohere after memory links them. Cabrera Infante, unlike Cortázar, does not feel impelled to instruct: he assumes the existence of a public that will appreciate his scrapbook technique and his depiction of a lost milieu. This public would share the archeological tastes of the readers of Joyce or Proust, and would not be jarred by the discontinuities of satire or the need to have a familiarity with pre-Castro Havana. The reader of Latin American satire is under great pressure; to read a book like Tres tristes tigres … he must not only know a great deal but must also hold his own literary expectations in abeyance, paying close attention to the...