Review: Barry Yourgrau on Virgilio Piñera

Author of wildly fanciful, joyously grotesque stories, poet, novelist, insatiably polemical critic, literary provocateur whose work blasted modernism into Cuba’s stultified theater

Virgilio Piñera

Last year a writer journalist I know, one with a Cuban mother, read some of the brief surrealish fiction I traffic in and said he was reminded of Virgilio Piñera.

Virgilio who?

So I’ve learned of Virgilio Piñera, who died in 1979 age sixty-seven, a pioneering and masterly practitioner of the absurd and surreal in Cuba and Latin America. And not only the author, most strikingly, of wildly fanciful, joyously grotesque stories, but also a poet, novelist, insatiably polemical critic, literary provocateur, and a seminal playwright whose work blasted modernism into Cuba’s stultified theater. A graphomane who “lived to write, lived for writing,” in the words of Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

And whose biography is a wrenching, tragic story itself. His career struggled, rose, and briefly soared, then collapsed into harrowing obscurity under Castro, whom he’d initially applauded. Redemption was only posthumous.