Persona y representación : Virgilio Piñeras en Máscaras de Leonardo Padura

Abstract

Out of the novels that make up Cuban writer Leonardo Padura’s detective tetralogy Las cuatro estaciones, Máscaras shows the freer and most suggestive creative representations. Among the plot guidelines, the character of Virgilio Piñera —poet, playwright and writer— stands out; this character is created by blending two different realities, a tangible, real one, and another one refashioned by the author. The fictional framework of Máscaras reveals a strategy in which the identities of real and imaginary characters intermingle, creating a dizzying succession of concealed selves and reinforcing the deception, hypocrisy and double moral present throughout the novel.