La mémoire éclatée

by Miguel Barnet

Évocation de la vie d'un jeune Cubain, entre 1940 et 1962, La mémoire éclatée est aussi un témoignage historique des vingt années précédant la révolution castriste. Mémoire éclatée, tels ces reflets de lumière sur la mer. La mer, personnage incontournable et source d'angoisse, dont les murs invisibles donnent, à La Havane, toute sa dimension d'initiatrice.

298 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 1, 1991

About the author

Miguel Barnet, is one of Cuba's most distinguished writers and poets as well as a member of the island's National Assembly. He is also the president of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), an organization with more than 8,000 members. He is an outspoken intellectual, having studied first in the United States and later at the University of Havana. He is best known for his testimonial novel Biography of a Runaway Slave, Biografía de un Cimarrón in Spanish, but he has written dozens of other novels, poems and articles, including a number of stories for Cigar Aficionado. He's been called the Truman Capote of Cuba.

Barnet first came to national attention as the poet of La piedra fina y el pavorreal (1963) and the much-praised La sagrada familia (1967), a lyrical autopsy of petit bourgeois domestic life. Publication of Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1968), the first in an ethnic tetralogy of documentary narratives, brought almost immediate international acclaim and established him as an innovating pioneer of the testimonial genre in contemporary Latin America. La canción de Rachel (1969; Rachel's Song, 1991), Gallego (1981), and La vida real (1986) confirmed his reputation as Cuba's premier exponent of the documentary novel.