The Good Parasite

Lorna Scott Fox

• The Collected Stories by Calvert Casey
  Duke, 224 pp, £11.50, May 1998, ISBN 0 8223 2165 3

‘Calvert Casey was born in Baltimore and raised in Havana. Calvert Casey was born in Havana and raised in Baltimore. American or Cuban, it’s the same ... The only certainty is that he was a writer.’ This is how Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who knew him as well as anyone did, got around the vagueness that still surrounds the early life of Calvert Casey, the cult author of 17 stories, a handful of critical articles and a poem. There has been little research on his life or the unpublished texts that are rumoured to exist, and the stories we have are hard to date more precisely than to the ‘early Sixties’ or ‘late Sixties’, in accordance with his three original collections of 1962, 1963 and 1969; but this is likely to be rectified soon. Casey’s mildly tragic life and meagre oeuvre are being rediscovered by a new generation of Latin Americans, who’ve had enough of the magic realist/political masters and their sensual and linguistic excesses. A wholesale ‘structural adjustment’ has taken place within the culture: if Casey was obscured during the age of thick tomes, his economical, almost ecological restraint in dealing with both the gross and the infinitesimal now provides a precedent for younger writers, while the crucial ineptitude for living that he expresses is entirely appropriate for the disabled Nineties.