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.
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