Bøger i Latin American Literature serien

A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early morning hours on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to Mexico to Buenos Aires, but above all it is about Argentina: its recent history, its 30,000 missing children, its stunned middle class, its writers in exile. He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure, combining narrative references to old-fashioned storytelling, realism, psychoanalysis, feminism, politics, and suspense, all of them tinged with a patina of eroticism that reflects a feminist perspective. Ultimately the disguises of the plot--transvestism, transsexualism, differing sexual points of view--become pieces in a puzzle tha can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Buenos Aires: "He who searches, finds."

Many of Cuba's intellectuals embraced the Castro regime, but Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who criticized it, was condemned as a traitor and forced into exile. From this bitter experience, which included his hospitalization for mental collapse, came the vivid sketches of Cuban life that made up the acclaimed "View of Dawn from the Tropics". In exile he revised this work into "Three Trapped Tigers", a savage comedy that catapulted him into the first rank of Latin American novelist.