Sarduy, Severo. Cobra. Translated by Suzanne Jill Devine. First Edition. New York, Dutton, 1975. 22 cm. XI, 176 pages. Original hardcover with illustrated dustjacket in Protective Mylar. Excellent condition with only very minor signs of external wear. This volume combines two avante-garde novels, published in 1972 and 1978, respectively, by this Cuban expatriate author. Both deal with a main character who undergoes a metamorphosis. ([Library Journal] Amazon).

Cobra

SARDUY, Severo

Dutton

Text: English, Spanish (translation)

Maitreya (English and Spanish Edition)

Levine, Suzanne Jill

Literature & Fiction

Ediciones Del Norte

Essays by the author of Cobra and Maitreya exploring literature, painting, simulation in animals and humans as well as the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva. "An important document in the history of Latin American literary criticism."--Alfred MacAdam, Review

Written on a Body

History & Criticism

Lumen Books

For Voice

United States

Latin American Literary Review Press

Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier. In his lifetime Severo Sarduy was best known for his exquistely wrought neo-baroque prose, but he was also an abstract painter and wrote plays and poetry in addition to fiction and essays. He abandoned medical school as a young man to pursue the world of art and literature, leaving his native Cuba shortly after the Revolution in 1960. He later became associated with the Parisian literary scene of the 1960's and 70's and later became a French citizen. Of his work Bruce Benderson writes, "Severo Sarduy was a baroque comedian and a callused workhorse in one...Each jewel-like sentence is structured with tawdry detail, only to unfold like a paper origami trick into new and more convoluted gesticulation, a new sacrilige."

Beach Birds

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

Barroco and Other Writings (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Arts & Photography

Stanford University Press

Severo Sarduy was among the most important figures in twentieth-century Latin American fiction and a major representative of the literary tendency to which he gave the name Neobaroque. While most of Sarduy's literary work is available in English, his theoretical writings have largely remained untranslated. This volume—presenting Sarduy's central theoretical contribution, Barroco (1974), alongside other related works—remedies that oversight. Barroco marks a watershed in postwar thought on the Baroque, both in French post-structuralism and in the Latin American context. Sarduy traces a double history, reading events in the history of science alongside developments in the history of art, architecture, and literature. What emerges is a theory of the Baroque as decentering and displacement, as supplement and excess, a theory capacious enough to account for the old European Baroque as well as its queer, Latin American and global futures. In addition to Barroco, this volume includes texts spanning Sarduy's career, from 1960s essays published originally in Tel Quel to late works from the 1980s and '90s. It thus offers a complete picture of Sarduy's thinking on the Baroque.

Born in eastern Cuba, Sarduy studied at the University of Havana, and, with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, was one of the few writers involved in the fight against Batista. At an early age he was made publisher of the Lunes de Revolucion, the official organ of the 26th of July Movement. In 1960 he left for Paris.In Paris Sarduy became the editor of the Latin American collection of Editions du Seuil, and became involved with the Tel Quel group. Among the books he introduced to the French were Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lezama Lima's Paradiso. Sarduy himself, meanwhile, published several works including Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Written on a Body), Maitreya, Colibri, La simulacion, Overdose, and Daiquiri, a book of poems that uses Baroque prosody to describe gay sex in explicit terms.De Donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a Song) was Sarduy's first truly experimental work. Divided into three sections, each corresponding to the ethnic groups that make up Cuban nationality (Spanish, African, and Chinese), the book explores the disparate elements at work in Latin American culture. Culture, for Sarduy, is a series of radical and often violent displacements and errors. Transvestitism becomes the common denominator as a symbol of transformation (physical and spiritual) and delusion. As Gonzalez Echevarria observes, "In De Donde son los cantantes, the characters look as if they're made up for a carnival that will let loose their deepest and weirdest fantasies. Sarduy's novel exposes the complicity between the novel's conventions and society's patriarchal structure. He denounces the quest for Latin American identity as yet another ideological maneuver by essentially epic novelists who want to strengthen the hold of the mechanisms of authority."

From Cuba With a Song (Sun & Moon Classics)

Sun & Moon Press

The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and Cobra was his finest creation. 
Originally published in 1972, Cobra recounts the tale of its eponymous heroine, queen of the Lyrical Theater of Dolls, whose obsession is to transform 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. In its spiraling series of transmutations, Cobra constructs a labyrinthine voyage, a “magical juggling act” (New York Times Book Review). 
In its first edition from Dalkey Archive Press, Cobra was bound with Sarduy's novel Maitreya (1978) which furthers the theme of metamorphosis. Transgressing genres and genders, reveling in literal and figurative transvestism, Sarduy's work is among the most daring achievements of postmodern Latin American fiction.

Cobra (Dalkey Archive Essentials)

Dalkey Archive Press

Firefly is a dream-like evocation of pre-war Cuba, replete with hurricanes, mystical cults and slave-markets. The story is the coming-of-age of a precocious and exuberant boy with an oversized head and underdeveloped sense of direction, who views the world as a threatening conspiracy. Told in breathless and lyrical prose, the novel is a loving rendition of a long-lost home, a meditation on exile, and an allegory of Cuba’s isolation in the world.

Firefly

Archipelago

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Books by SARDUY, Severo

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Cobra

Maitreya (English and Spanish Edition)

Written on a Body

For Voice

Beach Birds

Barroco and Other Writings (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Barroco and Other Writings (Cultural Memory in the Present)

From Cuba With a Song (Sun & Moon Classics)

Cobra (Dalkey Archive Essentials)

Firefly