Severo Sarduy

An innovative coming-of-age novel set in a magical, ancestral Cuba

Severo Sarduy's last novel, published in 1990, follows the adventures of Cocuyo, a child as naively perverse as he is charming, who peers into the world of adults in the streets of Havana during the Batista years. A journey in which the grotesque and the magical are mixed up with real life and from which he emerges completely transformed.

Possessing elaborate formal complexity and infused with a mocking, festive spirit, Cocuyo is one of the author's most emblematic novels, a poetic return to the Cuba of his childhood. 

“Dazzling and ultimately quite haunting … Firefly has maintained the dark beauty and mystery of the work … Rich poetry, elusive plotting, and layered images make for an interesting read.” Kirkus Reviews

 “Severo Sarduy has everything…so brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions, his findings, he leaves one breathless, like a shot of rum.” Richard Howard

“Sarduy rendered the epiphany of the body luminous, where the pleasure of the void meets the furious fire of the world.” The Washington Post

“..it is the language—the singing, ringing language—that makes Firefly a master work.” New York Journal of Books