Perverse International: Modern War and World Imaginings in Pablo de la Torriente Brau's Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano

This article examines Pablo de la Torriente Brau's 1936 novel, Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano, which was unfinished at the time of Brau's death and remains little known to this day. The novel's use of magical realism, proletarian narrative, and satire make it an important work for consideration in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism and world literature. I will show how the novel exposes the limits and epistemological implications of nationalist and internationalist models of community during the period between the First and Second World Wars, a crucial juncture both in world history and in the history of the concept of “world.” I argue that the novel's brand of magical realism allows it to represent its particular form of cosmopolitan critique, a cosmopolitanism of the undocumented.