Jorge Enrique Lage
by Sampsonia Way / August 1, 2013 / No comments
Editor of the magazine El cuentero and the publishing house Caja China of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center. He has published the short story collections Yo fui un adolescente ladrón de tumbas (Extramuros, 2004), Fragmentos encontrados en La Rampa (April, 2004), Los ojos de fuego verde (April, 2005), El color de la sangre diluida (Letras Cubanas, 2007), Vultureffect (Unión, 2011); and the novel Carbono 14, una novela de culto (Altazor, Perú, 2010).
In addition, Lage is a professional biochemist–someone capable of modeling with tiny molecules, of metamorphosing invisible things according to the intensity of his imagination. He has been accused of being an author that disguises science fiction, of being a textorrist who brings dynamics and dynamite to the concept of writing well in Cuba today: He neither defends nor denies these accusations. Jorge Enrique Lage knows that his readers may not yet exist (but when they do exist, perhaps then he may be the one who decides to remain silent).
Interview with Jorge Enrique Lage by Claudia Apablaza
“I narrate what emerges just behind the words, with that substance that remains, like a discomfort, like indigestion, inside the story you are telling. I am not the right reader to give definitions. The mixture and recycling seem to be a good starting point.”
“With respect to Cuban literature, I don’t have a negative or positive vision of it as a whole. That is, I don’t believe in that whole. I’m interested in a few Cuban authors: Some of them, even, are still alive. But in general, current Cuban narrative, most of it, which is published, given prizes and cloned, interests me not at all.”
“I believe that the issue of censorship is going to be with us for a while. Recently I have subscribed to this sentence by Bolaño: ‘Having the courage, knowing in advance that you will be defeated, and anyway going out to fight: This is literature.’” Read More.