From Cuba With a Song

by Severo Sarduy

Born in eastern Cuba, Sarduy studied at the University of Havana, and, with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, was one of the few writers involved in the fight against Batista. At an early age he was made publisher of the Lunes de Revolucion, the official organ of the 26th of July Movement. In 1960 he left for Paris.
In Paris Sarduy became the editor of the Latin American collection of Editions du Seuil, and became involved with the Tel Quel group. Among the books he introduced to the French were Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lezama Lima's Paradiso. Sarduy himself, meanwhile, published several works including Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Written on a Body), Maitreya, Colibri, La simulacion, Overdose, and Daiquiri, a book of poems that uses Baroque prosody to describe gay sex in explicit terms.
De Donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a Song) was Sarduy's first truly experimental work. Divided into three sections, each corresponding to the ethnic groups that make up Cuban nationality (Spanish, African, and Chinese), the book explores the disparate elements at work in Latin American culture. Culture, for Sarduy, is a series of radical and often violent displacements and errors. Transvestitism becomes the common denominator as a symbol of transformation (physical and spiritual) and delusion. As Gonzalez Echevarria observes, "In De Donde son los cantantes, the characters look as if they're made up for a carnival that will let loose their deepest and weirdest fantasies. Sarduy's novel exposes the complicity between the novel's conventions and society's patriarchal structure. He denounces the quest for Latin American identity as yet another ideological maneuver by essentially epic novelists who want to strengthen the hold of the mechanisms of authority."

Genres: Spanish Literature, Fiction

104 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four set pieces establish a feverish vision of Cuba. Embracing the Asian, European and African populations of Cuba this novel is a tableaux of origins and tensions. it also appears that Paglia demanded from the novelist, give me the cthonic and deign the rank and file in drag. Sarduy gleefully obeys.

I was often lost, as if bespelled by the witches from Macbeth. My dazzled eyes drifting skyward, curious about the breadcrumbs, lotus flowers and eventually snow flakes which fell onto the Caribbean island. I couldn't complain about the accompanying music.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books of all times, and Susan Jill Levine’s translation is a masterpiece. In the original, Sarduy makes allusions to Cuban pop culture, which Levine transforms into American pop culture references in order to maintain the tone. She finds equivalents for the original idioms, and conveys the odd mixture of raunchy and erudite humor that is Sarduy’s signature.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarduy's work may be the only fiction I read where I'm consistently confused about what is actually happening in the book--even down to what characters are in the book...but still come out satisfied. Somehow. Don't ask me for a plot summary. But read this book.

[Britanny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made it halfway before I decided I didn’t want to spend anymore time on this. The whole book is just a series of random events with random dialogue and while I didn’t exactly hate it, I just spent the whole time confused.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ludicrous book!

[Brian McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

i feel like im in another galaxy