Untitled drawing, Micah Carpentier, 1969

French publishing house Le Gardinier announced last week that acclaimed biographer Francine Nougaret has been commissioned to write the definitive biography of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier. Nougaret, whose previous subjects include U Thant, Sonia Delaunay and David Kusevitsky, is perfectly suited for the task. Her most recent book, “The Muse Has Wings: Nabokov, Saint-Saens and the Role of Lepidoptery in Art,” was the winner of 2006 Phalene Prize for non-fiction.

Needless to say, she has been assiduously picking the brain of Currado Malaspina. Perhaps no one alive knows as much about the notoriously reclusive Carpentier than Currado. They were together with Eldridge Cleaver in ’68, drinking white rum and eating croquetas in that dingy flat on La Rampa Street arguing about mambo and jazz. They were in Paris in the seventies writing dense polemical screeds for Le Revue Hebdomadaire, inciting a generation of art students toward acts of senseless aggression. And after the accident, Malaspina was at Carpentier’s bedside as he lay in the coma that ultimately claimed his life.

There has been much speculation whether this new biography, tentatively titled “Savage Afflatus: The Tragic Life of Micah Carpentier,” will reveal the identity of the woman who inspired Carpentier’s most lyrical drawings. For a while it was thought to be Sonia Braga. Some hypothesized that it was Estelita Rodriguez because of the gradient chin and the gloomy, jet-black eyes. Malaspina once told me that it was Borges’ 20-year-old niece, Rosalie, but I find that fairly implausible.

In any event, the publication of this new biography should be the next literary firestorm and Le Gardinier plans to release it in January 2013 so as not to distract the American public from the presidential election.