GUILTY OF DANCING THE CHACHACHÁ

A witty gathering of three ingeniously interrelated short stories, first published in 1995, by the Cuban-born postmodernist prankster (and recent winner of Spain’s prestigious Cervantes Prize) whose agreeably odd fiction includes Three Trapped Tigers (1971) and Infante’s Inferno (1984). The identical premise—a man and a woman, obviously lovers, lunching together in a Havana restaurant—is employed (and reworked) in all three, as the launching pad for a pun-filled fusillade of ironic reversals (“You are the exact opposite of the man of my dreams,” etc.) of the conventions of sex, politics, popular music, and the fiction-making process itself. “Have pun, will travel,” we’re advised at one particularly delectable moment. Cabrera Infante’s ebullient literary gamesmanship travels very well indeed.