Christ on the Rue Jacob

by Severo Sarduy

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").

Genres: Spanish Literature, Essays, France, Nonfiction, Memoir

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 3, 2005

About the author

Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.

Sarduy became close friends with Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and other writers connected with journal Tel Quel. His third novel, Cobra (1972), translated by Sollers won the Prix Medicis for a work of foreign literature in translation. In addition to his own writing, Sarduy edited, published and promoted the work of many other Spanish and Latin American authors first at Editions Seuil and then Editions Gallimard.

In Sarduy's 1993 obituary in The Independent, James Kirkup wrote, "Sarduy was a genius with words, one of the great contemporary stylists writing in Spanish. ... Sarduy will be remembered chiefly for his brilliant, unpredictable, iconoclastic and often grimly funny novels, works of a totally liberated imagination composed by a master of disciplined Spanish style. He encompassed the sublime and the ridiculous, mingling oral traditions with literary mannerisms adopted from his baroque masters.

Reviews

[Geoff]

The Amazon description (as GR is lacking one, and of all the things I am, I am not a GR librarian, with that insider's access and advantages):

"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")."

[Carlos Puig · Rating 5 out of 5]

He leído muy poco de Severo Sarduy, algunos ensayos y este libro que podríamos llamar autobiográfico, pero sin pensar en los formatos clásicos de las autobiografías. Sin duda, Sarduy es un creador, un artista de la palabra. Crítico, novelista, poeta, periodista, pero principlamente un devoto de la escritura y un explorador de las posibilidades del lenguaje. En la primera parte del libro aparece El Cristo de la Rue Jacob. Es un texto que Sarduy no se anima a clasificar de autobiografía plenamente. La primera parte la denomina Arquelogía de la piel. Los recuerdos se vinculan a heridas corporales, marcas que para él siguen hablando en la piel. La segunda parte es un conjunto de marcas en la memoria,   imágenes que él mismo señala que han quedado registradas de un modo más fuerte que el recuerdo, pero menos que una obsesión. También las llama epifanías. No nos vamos a encontrar en esta serie de textos con una narración autobiográfica clásica. Las siguientes partes del libro están compuestas por una serie textos diversos donde el autor indaga en sí mismo, devela situaciones, piensa en la escritura, rescata momentos, situaciones, lugares, personajes, libros, obras en una perpectiva reflexiva, reveladora y constructiva, de sus propias vivencias, reflexiones y cuestionamientos. El estilo de Sarduy es minucioso, culto, elaborado. Cierra este bello libro una especie de diario o apuntes, fechado el mismo año de deceso. Y no puedo dejar de transcribir esta cita tan significativa, considerando la cercanía de su muerte:  "Quizás porque el único modo de responder a un absurdo - y la muerte es el absurdo por excelencia- es un absurdo mayor: la escritura para nada, sin motivación ni destino, sin demostraciones teóricas ni trama, ni ficción, ni lectores, ni esfuerzos literarios o estéticos. En la libertad soberana de la gratuidad total."

[Kim Zinkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrated at completion...note to reread. Have not seen this volume around.

[Maori Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un experto en hablar de sí mismo, sentenciando que hasta Dios, finalmente, no es más que lo que hace y lo que conoce.

[Leonardo Rodríguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

No es un libro de rezos, ni siquiera la hagiografía de algún profeta parisino. Son las crónicas que Severo Sarduy, cubano de Camagüey y de París, escribió hacia el final de su vida. Tiene algo de historia clínica en clave humorística y poética. Habla de amigos muertos, del budismo Zen, al que fue muy afecto, de su madre y su padre, de una cierta mitología cubana, entrañable y de opereta, de cicatrices y literatura. También de Lezama y de la "prosa del cerveceo": las mejores páginas sobre la cerveza y sus efectos las he leído aquí.

Una mezcla singular de felicidad e inteligencia.