Everything in Its Place The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera

Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera is a seminal book that fills a major gap in Cuban and Latin American literary criticism. In addition to being the most comprehensive study to date of the life and work of Virgilio Piñera, this is the first book in English on this major twentieth-century Cuban author. In this study Thomas F. Anderson draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and diverse critical writings, bringing new insights into how Piñera's works responded to key literary influences as well as events in his life and in Cuban political and cultural history. Part I is an intellectual biography divided into three chapters that correspond to major periods of Piñera's life: his early literary career and his polemical association with Jose Lezama Lima and his literary circle, his years of self-imposed exile in Argentina where he collaborated with Borges and Witold Gomrowicz, and his rise to glory and precipitous fall into oblivion in the years following the Cuban Revolution. In these chapters Anderson emphasizes Piñera's polemical role as a cultural and social critic by examining little-studied articles published in Poeta, Orìgenes, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, Revolucìon, Lunes, and other journals and newspapers. In Part II Anderson explores Piñera's short stories, novels, and plays from various critical perspectives. In his analysis of Piñera's early stories in chapter 4, Anderson argues that while many of their central themes and motifs are clearly anchored in the universal aesthetic of the absurd, they also echo certain aspects of Cuba's socio-political reality in the early 1940s. In Chapter 5, Anderson draws attention to the impact of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and the Marquis de Sade on La carne de René (1952), and he posits that the homoerotic subtext of Piñera's first novel serves to debunk the myth of the aggressive, sexually domineering Latin American macho. In the following chapter on Peq