Recommendations
Books Like Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Cuban fiction, Havana novels, and books that celebrate language and popular culture
If Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers) delighted you with Cabrera Infante's linguistic exuberance, his celebration of pre-revolutionary Havana's nightlife, and his refusal to let any social or political anxiety dampen the pure pleasure of prose, these eight works share its joy in language, its love for a city, and its pleasure in the popular arts.
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Buy on AmazonInfante's Inferno
by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Cabrera Infante's second great Havana novel — autobiographical account of his erotic education from the 1940s onward; as linguistically inventive and as joyful as Three Trapped Tigers, and perhaps more accessible.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Rayuela (Hopscotch)
by Julio Cortázar
The other great Boom novel of linguistic play — Cortázar's Paris/Buenos Aires formal experiment alongside Cabrera Infante's Havana nightlife; together they map the Boom's two poles of formal ambition.
- 3
Buy on AmazonUlysses
by James Joyce
The model for Cabrera Infante's linguistic method — the parodies, the stream of consciousness, the encyclopedic absorption of popular culture into high literary prose; Three Trapped Tigers is the Cuban Ulysses.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño's great novel of Mexican literary bohemia — the visceral realists moving through the Mexico City of the 1970s have the same spirit of friendship, literary obsession, and city as backdrop that animates Three Trapped Tigers.
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Buy on AmazonFicciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
The Borgesian labyrinths that form the intellectual background of the Boom — where Cabrera Infante celebrates Havana's popular culture, Borges constructs library labyrinths; both are forms of infinite play.
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Buy on AmazonThe Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's Cuban novel — the Cuba of Santiago the old fisherman is the counterimage of Cabrera Infante's Havana; both capture a Cuba at the edge of transformation, one tragic and solitary, one carnivalesque and collective.
- 7
Buy on AmazonExplosion in a Cathedral
by Alejo Carpentier
Carpentier's great Caribbean novel of the Haitian Revolution — the other pole of Cuban literary ambition: where Cabrera Infante is joyful and popular, Carpentier is formal and Baroque; both are essential to the Cuban literary tradition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Hearing Trumpet
by Leonora Carrington
Carrington's surrealist novel of an old woman placed in a nursing home who discovers a world of secret societies and mythological transformation — the same pleasure in absurdist excess and the subversion of social reality.
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