José Lezama Lima
Cuba
Sentence after sentence of dense, sensuous metaphor piled without release: reading him feels like moving through syrup lit from within.
A severe asthmatic for his entire life, Lezama Lima rarely left Havana, building an entire cosmopolitan literary culture from inside one apartment and one city. He worked as a lawyer and minor civil servant while founding and editing Orígenes, the journal that gathered Cuba's most ambitious mid-century poets around him.
Paradiso, his one novel, took two decades to finish and provoked immediate scandal on its 1966 publication for its frank homoeroticism; official Cuban criticism denounced it even as Cortázar and others abroad championed it. Lezama Lima remained in Cuba after the revolution but fell from official favor.
Barred from traveling and largely cut off from publication in his final years, he died in Havana in 1976, in circumstances far more constrained than his prose.
Their books in the atlas
- 1966
ParadisoLvl 10bildungsroman
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