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. 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. In its first edition from Dalkey Archive Press, Cobra was bound with Sarduy's novel Maitreya (1978) which continues 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.
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)
