Cobra

“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 is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake, and explode. But if Cobra is a magical juggling act, of image balancing danger­ously upon image, the translation is as remarkable as the book itself. Levine has managed to snare Sarduy’s sense of play, all his conundrums and fabulations, and a good many of his Spanish puns, with a gorgeous transference of rhythms from one language to another.” —Jerome Charyn, New York Times Book Review 

 “In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other edge is the other delight: more, more, still more! one more word, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of words. Cobra is in fact a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull’s-eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell- mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again; a marbled, iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything or scolded for anything or, even worse, ‘permitted’ anything. Cobra is the pledge of con­tinuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss.” —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text 

 "Cobra is composed of jewel-like sentences that unfold like paper origami in convoluted proliferation. . . . Maitreya is one of the most radiant texts I have ever read, and the translation by Suzanne Jill Levine appears as seamless as a single ocean wave, spilling us from high elegance to low camp and back again without pause." —Bruce Benderson, Cups 

 "Hypnotic, poetic and challenging." —Gay Times 

"Maitreya [is] a mesmerizing literary mosaic fusing the memories of a Caribbean sense of place with a fluid existential state where transmigration is commonplace." —Juana Ponce de Leon, Voice Literary Supplement 

 "Maitreya'soutrageous characters maneuver through endless passages and trapdoors, as if in a 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' recited by saucy drag queens. The dialogue can be as sharp as that of divas speculating cock size, but the sentences are sometimes as ornate as the spaces his characters inhabit, rambunctious as their makeup." —Lawrence Chua, Voice Literary Supplement 

 "Sarduy rendered the epiphany of the body luminous, where the pleasure of the void meets the furious fire of the world." —Washington Post Book World