Dementia Peacocks

THREE TRAPPED TIGERS

by G. CABRERA INFANTE 487 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

The reader is forewarned, even five-or six-warned:

The Hounds of the Radziwills. J'aime Joys. Menasha Troy. Ladonna Oldsmobile. Teas Eliot. Troubles With My Cant, by Green Grams. Against Impenetration, by Su Sanstag. Joseph Awfulsop. Devil's Avocado. Schwahili (the language spoken by Schweitzer). Dr. Dyingstone, I exhume.

What is all but incredible about this dizzying slapstick is not that the author has the worst case of the Marx blathers on record, but that he is a Cuban, and wrote it all first in Spanish. His novel, a brilliantly loony memoir of life in Havana just before Castro's takeover, was called Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers) in the original. When Cabrera Infante and a couple of steady-nerved friends did the English transmogrification of TTT, the tongue twisting of the title seemed more important than its negligible sense, and so the tigers were trapped.

TTT may sound like a fairly good grade of college humor, but it is a good deal more: the fond, wondering recollection of a double exile, a man separated by circumstance from his country and by a decade and more from his youth. (Author Cabrera Infante, 42, is a leftist who regards Castro as a Stalinist and a gangster, and now lives in London.) His book is a remarkably good novel of memory, and it is memory that splits the images and works the magnifications, producing the prose pratfalls, the crosscutting of parody and boozy interior monologue, the bits of trivia in two languages worn smooth like lucky stones.

A reader who does not resist the flow absorbs a sense of Havana at the end of Batista's reign: overripe, tainted, almost innocent. The time is generally city-night in Cabrera Infante's narrations. The punning speakers are young dementia peacocks: an actor, a photographer, an assortment of nightclub chicks. They drink, flirt, gossip, listen to music, flip tag lines from American movies at each other.

Their gringoized culture seems to them slightly sluttish. Their thinking is "cogitus interruptus." Only occasionally is there a political edge to their talk. Toward the end of the novel, the actor says without much conviction that he is going to join the guerrillas in the mountains. The announcement causes little stir, and is swept away by the barman's rag.

The author has gone to some effort to make this extraordinary book comprehensible to English-speaking readers; his Englishing goes far beyond mere translation. Nevertheless, some of it is understandable only in a general way to those not familiar with Cuba and the Spanish language.

A prudent reviewer will therefore not make ringing pronouncements. But it is clear that TTT can stand on the same shelf with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's very dissimilar One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the provocative obscurities of Jorge Luis Borges. A much-impressed norteamericano wonders what else is hidden in the Latin trunk.

qedJohn Skow

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