Books in Brief

View of Dawn in the Tropics, by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (Harper, 145 pp., $8.95). This is a history of Cuba in sketches that draw upon fact but read like fiction. The sketches run at longest three pages; the shortest is 15 words. Characters—many of them historical personages—have no names. Scenes are set in the mountains, in the city, on the highway, without further identification. They are placed in time only by their references to engravings as opposed to photographs, and by the appearance of machine-guns. The past is a mystery, Cabrera Infante contends; it comes clear not through analysis but through imagination. Thus he has cast his imagination back to the moment Cuba rose from the sea. From the very first it reminds him of bloodshed: Cuba is like “a long green wound.” Violence is the heart of the Cuban past: “In what other country of the world is there a province named Matanzas, meaning ‘Slaughter’?” No other; for in no other country has killing been so indiscriminate. The sketches in View of Dawn are almost exclusively portrayals of senseless death. Conquistadores turn a feast into a massacre because, receiving a friendly reception from the Indians, they “thought that so much courtesy was intended to kill them for sure.” A young man running along a rooftop is shot by a soldier. From the days of the Spaniards through Castro the bloodshed has not ceased. But Cabrera Infante never descends into rationalization. For him it is enough that people have died. In drumming the theme of incessant violence, however, Cabrera Infante communicates more than outrage. He is mortified by what he has found in the histories and in the latest news (he left Cuba in 1965 and lives now in London). But he is also bored by the inability of his countrymen to break free of the urge to slaughter. His country’s history can be narrowed, as he shows in View of Dawn, to a single therne. He has no hope that the Cubans will turn around. One can only smile ironically, he says, and admire the island itself, “surviving all disasters, eternally washed by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.” PAUL T. HORNAK

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (Harcourt Brace, 371 pp., $12.95). You don’t have to like Virginia Woolf’s novels to enjoy her diaries. There’s an essential honesty and incision about the diaries which sets them above pieces of refined silliness and anemic decadence like Orlando. In her diaries, Mrs. Woolf describes an interesting life and social circle with the judgment and élan of an inspired restaurant critic writing about interesting cuisine. And—what is much more unusual—she turns the same critical gift unsparingly, but not hatefully, on herself. The result is a number of passages as beautifully written as anything in her fiction, but with an added ring of truth. Virginia Woolf was a snob; unlike most snobs, she knew it and accepted it as a part of her nature, neither a vice nor a virtue— merely the social equivalent of an overdeveloped sense of smell. Yet she could see poetry in simple, almost sordid scenes, as witness the following 1920 entry in her diary: “A bright night; with a fresh breeze. An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud. There was a recklessness about her; much in the spirit of London. Defiant—almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth. How many Junes has she sat there, in the heart of London? How she came to be there, what scenes she can go through, I can’t imagine. O damn it all, I say, why can’t I know all that too? Perhaps it was the song at night that seemed strange; she was singing shrilly, but for her own amusement, not begging. Then the fire engines came by —shrill too; with their helmets pale yellow in the moonlight. Sometimes every thing gets into the same mood; how to define this one I don’t know—It was gay, & yet terrible & fearfully vivid. . . .” Volume II of the diaries covers 1920-1924, with four more volumes to come. Mrs. Bell deserves credit for being a thorough, informative but unmeddling, editor.

PH

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Paul T. Hornak

AB

About the Author

Aram Bakshian Jr.

JA

About the Author

Joseph A. Rehyansky

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View of Dawn in the Tropics, by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (Harper, 145 pp., $8.95). This is a history of Cuba in sketches that draw upon fact but read like fiction. The sketches run at longest three pages; the shortest is 15 words. Characters—many of them historical personages—have no names. Scenes are set in the mountains, in the city, on the highway, without further identification. They are placed in time only by their references to engravings as opposed to photographs, and by the appearance of machine-guns. The past is a mystery, Cabrera Infante contends; it comes clear not through analysis but through imagination. Thus he has cast his imagination back to the moment Cuba rose from the sea. From the very first it reminds him of bloodshed: Cuba is like “a long green wound.” Violence is the heart of the Cuban past: “In what other country of the world is there a province named Matanzas, meaning ‘Slaughter’?” No other; for in no other country has killing been so indiscriminate. The sketches in View of Dawn are almost exclusively portrayals of senseless death. Conquistadores turn a feast into a massacre because, receiving a friendly reception from the Indians, they “thought that so much courtesy was intended to kill them for sure.” A young man running along a rooftop is shot by a soldier. From the days of the Spaniards through Castro the bloodshed has not ceased. But Cabrera Infante never descends into rationalization. For him it is enough that people have died. In drumming the theme of incessant violence, however, Cabrera Infante communicates more than outrage. He is mortified by what he has found in the histories and in the latest news (he left Cuba in 1965 and lives now in London). But he is also bored by the inability of his countrymen to break free of the urge to slaughter. His country’s history can be narrowed, as he shows in View of Dawn, to a single therne. He has no hope that the Cubans will turn around. One can only smile ironically, he says, and admire the island itself, “surviving all disasters, eternally washed by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.” PAUL T. HORNAK

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (Harcourt Brace, 371 pp., $12.95). You don’t have to like Virginia Woolf’s novels to enjoy her diaries. There’s an essential honesty and incision about the diaries which sets them above pieces of refined silliness and anemic decadence like Orlando. In her diaries, Mrs. Woolf describes an interesting life and social circle with the judgment and élan of an inspired restaurant critic writing about interesting cuisine. And—what is much more unusual—she turns the same critical gift unsparingly, but not hatefully, on herself. The result is a number of passages as beautifully written as anything in her fiction, but with an added ring of truth. Virginia Woolf was a snob; unlike most snobs, she knew it and accepted it as a part of her nature, neither a vice nor a virtue— merely the social equivalent of an overdeveloped sense of smell. Yet she could see poetry in simple, almost sordid scenes, as witness the following 1920 entry in her diary: “A bright night; with a fresh breeze. An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud. There was a recklessness about her; much in the spirit of London. Defiant—almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth. How many Junes has she sat there, in the heart of London? How she came to be there, what scenes she can go through, I can’t imagine. O damn it all, I say, why can’t I know all that too? Perhaps it was the song at night that seemed strange; she was singing shrilly, but for her own amusement, not begging. Then the fire engines came by —shrill too; with their helmets pale yellow in the moonlight. Sometimes every thing gets into the same mood; how to define this one I don’t know—It was gay, & yet terrible & fearfully vivid. . . .” Volume II of the diaries covers 1920-1924, with four more volumes to come. Mrs. Bell deserves credit for being a thorough, informative but unmeddling, editor.