Cobra

Cobra

Novel , 1972

Cuneta

Pages: 216

This novel narrates the attempts of Cobra, the most beautiful transvestite of the Teatro Lírico de Muñecas, to reduce the size of her feet. To achieve this, she resorts to different methods, but far from producing the expected results, all these procedures turn her nails a 'lezamesco purple' color, the soles are covered in greenish-black sores, and, finally, they sprout a 'white dwarf' from them, Cobra's little double or outgrowth.

Cobra is a surprising and groundbreaking work in many ways, not only because it addresses issues that, in the seventies when it was first published, were still quite eccentric to the Latin American literary canon, such as transvestism, drag queens, homosexuality, and even Buddhism, but also for its incredible language, inspired by both Spanish baroque and the musicality of Cuban speech. Sarduy's prose blends different languages, is rich in fantastic neologisms, hyperbolic (grotesque or sumptuous) images, hypnotic esdrújula sounds, Darian resonances, and Lezamian legacies.

This edition of Cobra, a central novel in the corpus of Latin American neobaroque and marginal to the boom, gives today's readers the opportunity to revisit or discover an inexhaustible work.

'In Cobra, language is reconstructed elsewhere by the hasty flow of language. In what other place? In the paradise of words. It is truly a paradisiacal, utopian text (without place) (…) A speckled, colored text; we are filled with language like children to whom nothing will be denied, reproached, or, worse still, allowed.' Roland Barthes, El placer del texto

'Cobra would be that cosmetic mask, that transformation that takes place in a body, whose passion would be for me the only Western equivalent of the ritual theaters of the East. Those theaters where transvestism and religion (the text) form a single entity.' Severo Sarduy