Guillermo Cabrera Infante's [La Habana para un infante difunto]—autobiography, novel, biography or erotic fantasy of a precocious Cuban don Juan—is a tropical education sentimentale defying generic classification. If nine-year-old New Yorkers rob banks, their uninhibited Latin American counterparts father children, or dream about it. Feminism may be alive and well (and living in Argentina), Severo Sarduy may idolize an Indian friend in the pages of Vuelta …, but machismus is far from moribundus…. In any case, Latin American literature certainly does present some of the more viable, heroic, heterosexual alternatives, from Macondo's exuberant Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano Buendía to La guaracha del macho Camacho, Puerto Rico's national saga of the guachafita, and now the work of the Cuban Quevedo.

Be this as it may, Cabrera Infante's latest effort decidedly has a lot of Bildung and a little of Roman, although it ultimately never comes across as...