Cobra

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)