Three Trapped Tigers (Tres Tristes Tigres)

[tractatus]

I was writing this to underrated writers thread but possibly not the true place. He deserves a thread at least. I have done searchs in forum, and somehow disappointed about results.

Three Trapped Tigers = 0 result
(after 60 seconds)
Guillermo Cabrera Infante = 0 result

Infante's masterpiece, "Three Trapped Tigers" was really "spine-tingling" for me. Also this book can easily impress anyone who like Joyce/Joycean style.

In a very personal point of view, if Ulysses = Karamazov in classic scale, this book is easily equal to Crime&Punishment.

Any readers? TTT/Infante fans? Or I am very subjective?

[superunknown]

Never heard of it but it sounds interesting. I'll see if I can get my hands on a Spanish version of it somewhere. I was intrigued by the title as it's based on a popular tonguetwister (a bit like naming a book She Sells Sea Shells), although the literal meaning is three sad tigers but replacing it with the world trapped does maintain some of the tonguetwister elements of the Spanish title.

Thanks for the heads up, I love Latin American literature so I'll be sure to check it out when I can.

[Nighteyes5678]

I'll have to look it up myself...

[tractatus]

Superunknown, you are true about the name of the book. Sad turned into trapped just for keeping "TTT" and "game" says my edition.

A one page copy paste is here, I will put it to "Tea" thread.
Additionally, this citation gives no idea about book. ;)

Tea cantate, Coffee concerto, Mate hymn :

Coffee is a sexual stimulant. Tea is intellectual. Mate is the bitter primitive residue of a hungover dawn in New York circa 1955. (I am speaking for myself and also for you, Silvestre. I don't care what the scientists say. For this reason my example should be seen as both personal and remote.)

A coffee sipped on the corner of 12th and 23rd, at dawn, or just before, the morning wind from the Malecon still on my face, stinging my senses and the speed (the thing about speed that is so intoxicating is that it turns a physical action into a metaphysical experience: speed turns time into space -- I, Silvestre, told him that the movies turn space into time and Cue answered, That is another experience that physics cannot comprehend), the speed, I myself, buffeted head-on and in profile by this dawn wind, exhaustion and an empty stomach making you conscious of your body, with that beauteous lucidity of insomnia after a night session cutting endless bars of soap operas, cut in your mind, it is then that a coffee -- a simple coffee costing three centavos -- a strong black coffee drunk when El Flaco, that long thin shadow, leaves his night shift, after scandalizing the workers going early to their work, the nightwalkers, the exhausted night watchment, the night whores standing drenched in dew and sperm, all these, all this fauna of the night zoo you find at the gates of the Colon cemetery, all these people hit by his Tchaikovsky his Prokoviev his Stravinsky (and let his megamelomania go as far as Webern and Schonberg and -- but, my God, they'd lynch him! -- Edgar Varese), names which El Flaco, flaccidly, would hardly be able to pronounce, playing them on 23rd and 12th (and note that 23 and 12 make 35 and 3 and 5 make 8 while the sums of 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 respectively make 5 and 3, which also make 8: this street corner is perpetually condemned to traffic with the dead: 8 means death in charada, as you know: this explains why the cemetary being on 12th and Zapata, a very long block away from 12th and 23rd, 23rd and 12th is a common synonym in Havana for cemetary), playing them on that pitiful portable phonograph of his which scratches all his records -- this half cup of water and aroma and blackness is transformed (in me) into an urgent need to go in search, Eribo of the actresses, of them, call them N or M or M or N, or whatever her name is, call on them, on her, and wake her from her dreams of scenic grandeur and what with her heavy somnolence and my keen-edged wakefulness and the tumescent heat of this eternal summer's morning, to make love to make love to make love to, her to make to.

Tea always makes me work, think, want to get things done -- intellectually, that is.

There must be some scientific explanation, something connected with excitation of the lobes or the circulation of the blood or what the phrenologists would call a perfusion under the cranial cortex and also with the titillation, out of sympathy, of the solar plexus. But I don't want to admit it, I don't want to have anything to do with it, I don't want to know this hypothesis. Don't tell me, Silvestre. Please, no. Ay! Que no queiro saberla!