Three Trapped Tigers
Havana in 1958, in the months before everything changes: a photographer, an actor, a writer and a bongo player move between the Tropicana, the bars and the seafront, talking without stopping. A huge Black singer called La Estrella performs a cappella and refuses all accompaniment, while the talk keeps breaking into puns, tongue-twisters, film gossip and parodies of famous Cuban authors describing the death of Trotsky. Written in Cuban speech rather than literary Spanish, it is the Boom's great comic performance and is long read as the work in which language itself is the protagonist.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
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