i>Paradiso was first published in Cuba in 1966 and quickly hailed as a masterpiece by such eminent writers as Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Written by Cuba's most important poet, it tells the story of José Cemí, who, in the wake of his father's premature death, comes of age in turn-of-the-century Cuba, "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes" (Washington Post). Weaving the exhilarations and defeats of love into extraordinary erotic verbal tapestries, Lezama Lima narrates Cemí's search for his dead father and for an understanding of love and the powers of the mind.

Both an archetype and a microcosm of Cuban society, Paradiso is as perceptive and psychologically intricate as Proust's vision of France, and as vigorous and sometimes corroded as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.