Three Trapped Tigers

2 ideas

1. Written language cannot capture living speech

   The book presents itself as a transcription of spoken Cuban Spanish and warns in its opening note that it is meant to be heard, not read. Its repeated failures, including mistranslations, garbled reportage and parody, show that fixing speech in print strips away tone, rhythm and local sound, which carry much of the meaning. What the page keeps is only a shadow of what was said aloud.

2. Parody as a test of style

   In one section the same event, Trotsky's assassination, is rewritten in the voices of seven canonical Cuban writers, each one pastiched. Laying different styles over one fixed subject shows that a writer's manner can be imitated and separated from content, and that literary tradition is partly a set of verbal habits open to mockery. Seen this way, style is a device that can be taken apart and exposed.

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