Bøger af Severo Sarduy

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.

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)