Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Cuban exile writer Severo Sarduy represents the highly experimental literature of Latin America. His novela Maitreya (Barcelona, 1978), now in an exquisite English translation, stands as its author's response to French structuralist theories. An excellent introduction by critic Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria sets Sarduy's love-hate relationship with the Cuban Revolution and points to his experimental literary development. Maitreya is a complex novel that takes place in the Cuba of the early 1960x and in Tibet after the Chinese invasion in 1950. Sarduy's main purpose is to establish clear comparisons between both political movements and to display exile behavioral patterns provoked by these movements. The rest of the work's interpretation is left to the reader's abilities in facing the rupture of traditional literary structures. As described by Gonzalez Echevarria, Maitreya is ``the most compelling product of contemporary Latin American fiction,'' a challenge worth taking. A useful addition to advanced undergraduate and graduate Spanish programs, comparative literature departments, and Caribbean literature studies.-R. Ocasio, University of South Alabama

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Sarduy has written primarily in exile and under the aegis of contemporary French intellectual and cultural movements. His essays are dense speculations about the complex structure of contemporary culture, a line of inquiry that forms the basis of his highly wrought fiction. He explores individuals and situations as the intersection of multiple levels of cultural formation enacted (unconsciously by the characters) in even the most menial actions and events. Stripped down to their narrative core, Sarduy's novels typically deal with the quotidian, but the quotidian figured in a richly textured language that is as difficult to read as his cultural formations are to understand. Moreover, Sarduy has been especially audacious both in depicting taboo (panerotic sexualism, homosexuality, transvestism, and transgressive "gender bending" in general) and in demonstrating taboo's irrelevance to daily life. In Sarduy's vision, the lines drawn between taboo and transgression, the conventional and the deviant, are not real. In one sense, Sarduy's writing is quintessentially Cuban in themes and tone, while at the same time one of the best examples of Latin American late modernism. (Bowker Author Biography)