Synopsis
"Sarduy's 'inventory of marks,' both physical and mnemonic, is a collection of 26 essays that, in Sarduy's words, 'outline a possible autobiography.' Afterword by collaborative translators Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/A collection of personal epiphanies reflects on the author's Cuban youth, life in Paris, friendships and sexual encounters, and more
Reviews
This truly beautiful book is the last by the Cuban-born, Paris-nurtured writer who died in 1993 of AIDS. In a collection of brief, even minute, essays, he offers maps to the passage of time. The first such map is his body, on which "epiphanies" are marked by scars-beginning with the navel, the first wound. The second map is Sarduy's mind, filled with sharp impressions of places (Cafe de Flore, Benares) and people (Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino). It can make for lonely reading, in part because many friends (Barthes and Calvino among them) are dead. In "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," Sarduy recounts the changes in his address book as death threatens to turn it into a "novel, or biographical fiction." But, facing his own death, Sarduy refuses to remove the name of a dead friend because "it would be like eradicating him all over again, as if I were an accomplice of the void, subjecting him to another death within death." There is also a certain loneliness to Sarduy's style, perfectly translated here by Levine and Maier. His intricate descriptions bear the stamp of the eternal observer. But what descriptions:like a great singer, he maintains a flow of carefully modulated phrases, one tumbling over the next, without ever pausing for a breath ("The house, which my father had wrested from a brackish and inopportune spring that gushed at dawn from the foundation, was sinking along a whitewashed hallway toward a patio filled with large earthenware jugs and refreshed by the red shadow of a royal poinciana").
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Sarduy, an important contemporary Cuban writer, recently died in Paris, his home for more than three decades. As a novelist, he was a complicated, nonlinear storyteller; as a nonfiction prose writer, as exhibited in this posthumous collection of brief verbal pictures, he was no less experimental and just as splendidly provocative. These pieces fall into a category difficult to define; even Sarduy admits "their genre is ambiguous." Nonetheless, readers will encounter within them astringent yet lovely writing. Part one gathers sketches that are loosely autobiographical. "By reading the body's scars, anyone could write a personal archaeology," he maintains, but his modesty is disingenuous, for few writers can relate the signposts of their life's journey as trenchantly and meaningfully as he. Excessive alcohol consumption and an attack of appendicitis have never been so beautifully described! In part two, Sarduy displays his amazing dexterity with language in a series of impressions of places, events, and material objects, from Paris' Cafe{‚}de Flore to the city of Benares in India. A special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed. Brad Hooper
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