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Cobra - And, Maitreya (Paperback, 1st ed) Loot Price: R346
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Cobra - And, Maitreya (Paperback, 1st ed): Severo Sarduy

Cobra - And, Maitreya (Paperback, 1st ed)

Severo Sarduy; Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine; Introduction by James McCourt

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List price R393 Loot Price R346 Discovery Miles 3 460 You Save R47 (12%)

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One of those parodic novels that comments on itself, Cobra also has a footnote addressing "moronic readers," equations, rotten poems, anagrams of Cobra interwoven with the presumptive plot, and more doppelgangers than anything since Pynchon. Sarduy's simultaneous narrative and autopsy note, in asides, the "Lezamesque" and "Borgesian" moods of his novel and introduce both Count Julian and Gustave Flaubert. (Sarduy is a Cuban exiled in Paris.) Later, in Morocco, William Burroughs makes a cameo appearance inside this series of hallucinatory arabesques and putrefactions that owe no small debt to the master junkie. It's "the culmination of the New Latin American Novel" writes Suzanne Jill Levine in her introduction - but one thinks of the old, old shaggy-dog gamesmanship of Tristram Shandy. It's the same kind of tease - a nip-and-tuck sparring match with the reader, that "moronic" mirror of the writer's art. Part I takes place in a "heterotopic" bawdyhouse called Lyrical Theater of the Dolls where Cobra is the transvestite Queen of the chorus girls in search, along with her/his "Caravaggesque" dwarf Pup, of that ultimate Transformation. In Part II the dolls are replaced by S-M leather boys who initiate Cobra into bondage and also Indian spiritualism. (East and West are another of Sarduy's dialectic themes.) The smell of hashish and sandalwood pervades, along with the ambrosias of blood, urine, excrement, saliva, semen. Abracadabra rococo. (Kirkus Reviews)
The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and here bound back to back are his two finest creations. Cobra (1972) recounts the tale of a transvestite named Cobra, star of the Lyrical Theater of the Dolls, whose obsession is to transform his/her body. She is assisted in her metamorphosis by the Madam and Pup, Cobra's dwarfish double. They too change shape, through the violent ceremonies of a motorcycle gang, into a sect of Tibetan lamas seeking to revive Tantric Buddhism. Maitreya (1978) continues the theme of metamorphosis, this time in the person of Luis Leng, a humble Cuban-Chinese cook, who becomes a reincarnation of Buddha. Through Leng, Sarduy traces the metamorphosis of two hitherto incomparable societies, Tibet at the moment of the Chinese invasion, and Cuba at the moment of revolution. Transgressing genres and genders, reveling in literal and figurative transvestism, these two novels are among the most daring achievements of postmodern Latin American fiction.

General

Imprint: Dalkey Archive Press
Country of origin: United States
Release date: May 2023
First published: June 1995
Authors: Severo Sarduy
Translators: Suzanne Jill Levine
Introduction by: James McCourt
Dimensions: 230 x 141 x 21mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback - Trade
Pages: 273
Edition: 1st ed
ISBN-13: 978-1-56478-076-8
Categories: Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
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LSN: 1-56478-076-7
Barcode: 9781564780768

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