The opening statement of Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres is crucial to its reading. Pronounced by a feminine voice, it is the very embodiment of the negativity of language to tell, desire, as well as absence of being and of story. The first sentence of the text is the first detour the «show» announced in the prologue takes. As per the dictum, the adverb «nunca» of the first sentence becomes a spell that captures any attempt to tell, destabilizing the concept of the familiar and challenging notions of power, silence, loquaciousness, and the feminine as an excluded element. In this manner, the text offers us a vision of the speaking subject attempting to tell a story: a fragmented body before an elusive past, attempting to catch a fleeting signifier: «...la escritura no es más que un intento de atrapar la voz humana al vuelo.»

Autorentext

The Author: Carmen Teresa Hartman was born in Colombia, South America, where she received her B.A. in linguistics and literature. After studying applied linguistics at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, she received her M.A. in linguistics and literature and her Ph.D. in Spanish American literature from the State University of New York at Albany. Her doctoral dissertation received a Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Zusammenfassung
"To deal with the question of subject, especially in relation to a Latin writer, and to take on, through it and alongside it, French (Lacanian) theory is a major undertaking, a promise that Carmen Hartman fulfills in most extraordinary ways. The promise is of global understanding of relations between (minor) Latin writers and (major) European theorists. The 'major' and the 'minor', the 'Latin' and the 'European' become implicitly contested terms in Hartman's book, and her working through of Cabrera Infante's novel in relation to (even in opposition to) Lacanian psychoanalysis is a truly erudite, significant, piercing intervention in how one goes about studying literatures and cultures." (Helen Regueiro Elam, Associate Professor, Department of English, State University of New York at Albany)
"A novel and illuminating study of current controversies of power, gender, and body in relation to language. A must-read book that provides an invaluable insight into the implications of psychoanalysis with regard to literature." (Perla Sasson-Henry, Department of Language Studies, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland)