Hello Gentle Reader
Personally I suspect that there will always be a delight in narratives, about children. This innocent directionless view of the world. Were one is carried away more on the wind then by their internal compass. From south wind, with its gentle breeze carries one off to some summer paradise. Or the west wind that follows one behind, like an invisible dog – carefully watching and observing one as they kick stones. Boredom preoccupying the mind. To the north wind that blasts the face. Soft shards of snowflakes sticking to the scarves and toques that our mothers made us wear; and which we begrudgingly wore. Yet after the north wind, bitter and mean, pushed at our jackets, tried to nip at our ears, and went after any exposed flesh, we became more thankful for our mothers: thankful for their warm hearts, and their almost doting fuss over us. The east wind was the most horrifying in my opinion. It pushes over the prairies. It’s warm and dry, like locusts breath. It appears to come off at the very edge of summer. When it mixed with the coolness of the sky and the silent stillness and the wet humidity of an incoming storm, disaster was almost abound. A cloudburst of hail! Small ice orbs, which hurt like stones. Dinting the car and shattering on impact, when they hit the ground. They tear and shred the plants. Petals massacred around. Their home plants unadorned heads naked and bruised. House siding punctured full of holes. Tree’s left in tatters. Their leaves lacerated and pockmarked, like rusted tin cans. When it’s all over and done with, the damage is evident. Yet with a slight thankful “phew,” it wasn’t worst then it could have been. A tornado was in the forecast – well at least a warning. It’s the east wind speciality; this feared spinning vortex of dirt and dust. Then in the end, its parting leaves an oddment: a rainbow. A bow of vibrant colours from all over the day. Blue from the sky, yellow of the prairie harvest, green of the grass, red of the flowers, and violet the passing and last colour of the day. All placed on the backdrop of the grey sullen clouds of the east wind, with an eerie silence permeating throughout the landscape. – The best writers who write in the coming of age work use a lyrical prose and almost magically infused realism. In essence they depict a world foreign and incredibly unique to childhood and children. These childhood stories for adults are some of the best work that I have had the chance to read. I think of the children that have populated the works of some of the best works I have read, like Kamal from Naguib Mahfouz’s “The Cairo Trilogy,” who especially in “Palace Walk,” where his innocence often, offers the most comedic elements of the work. The ‘girl,’ from Adania Shibli’s “Touch,” – whose impressionistic and lyrical prose, shows the beauty of the world; and its unfiltered (though not understood) horrors of life, to the forefront. Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio’s characters: Mondo, Lullaby, and Daniel – characters who try to understand the worlds natural beauty; to refusing to go to school, and exploring the world; to young boy who decides to see the sea, and live amongst an ocean of blue. I know there was enjoyment in their simplicity. Their almost earthly sense of the world. Taking everything at face value, and yet still having a sense of wonder of the world. They offer some of the most profound, innocent and comical understandings of the world.
Severo Sarduy was a highly acclaimed Cuban poet, novelist, playwright and literary critic. He lived and worked in Paris and is considered one of the best prose writers of the twentieth century – along with so many other great prose writers. He died at the age of fifty six in nineteen-ninety three, from complications of AIDs. In nineteen-seventy two he won the Prix Médicis (Medici Prize) for his novel “Cobra.” Along with other Cuban writers: Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Reinaldo Arenas – he was considered one of the greatest writers from Cuba. Sarduy wrote very lyrical and Barque inspired prose. The prose itself is something entirely splendid and unique in its own way. The entire world and landscape that Severo Sarduy presents is both dreamlike, exotic and a mystical nightmare. One in which the poor main protagonist Firefly appears to inhabit. With his lack of direction he often disrupts the surroundings, and finds himself in some of the most nightmarish and comical situations. The syntax of the sentences renders each situation with colourful and vivid descriptions. Often to the point of excessive visual delight. As Roland Barthes stated; to read Sarduy is to be immersed in: “the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure.”
“To us, they appear as if in yellowed photographs or old faded postcards, surrounded by their appurtenance, their favourite gadgets, like peasants at a fair with the wooded cigarette’s, desiccated cockatoos, sailors’ caps, or tiny rings, all produced by the photographer and yet true to the subject; identity.”
Set in the fictional city of Upsalón U – “Firefly,” recounts the whole history of pre-Castro revolution Cuba. Sprinkled with symbols and images, along with their own cultural markers of hurricanes, slave markets, squalid brothels, mystical Caribbean cults, radios, jukeboxes, and baseball caps – all of it exists in this dreamscape of what maybe a baroque hallucination. A favourite passage early on, remarks about how each family has their own secret recipe for rat poison. As the commercially bought product, has but become ineffective.
“Each family kept a potion of its own invention (the beasts were invulnerable to store-bought ones, immune to all known poisons), which they spread among the armoires and under the beds before retiring and kept in the pantry alongside bunches if onions hanging from the rafters, whole hams for Christmas Eve, copper frying pans, and one or more seven-armed Toledo lamps, vestiges of a nearby antique dealer gone bankrupt or a long-past fire in some synagogue.”
One can just almost see the portrayal: An exotic land, of vibrant coloured birds; phosphorescent insects, dazzling snakes of sunlit scales, and fish with translucent moonlit bellies. Amidst all this a culture based off of African and colonial mixed cultures. Of Christian symbols desecrated with afro-voodoo. Of skulls and spirits, find home in the gardens where their tribal marked practitioners sold as slaves; carryon their ancient customs of their far off homeland. Just picture the radiant houses and buildings. Their colours polished to the point of luminosity. Red, greens, aquamarines, blues as deep as the ocean, turquoise the colour of the sea at sunset; hazy sulphuric lemon yellows; violets as vibrant as bird feathers, and purples that glimmer like dusk. Those simply constructed buildings. Adorned with the arabesque balcony railings; the barque inspired decoration. Simply sweeping arches, held up by the Greek inspired plaster sculpted columns.
Firefly’s problems all start, with the arrival of the hurricane. That frightens him. His fear becomes a cruel joke by his family. So no one will know he was afraid; Firefly comes up with a concoction – an alchemistical brew of homemade rat poison and linden tea. Yet his homicidal plot is foiled, when taken to the hospital the affliction is realised rather suddenly and abruptly by two grotesque master doctors – Gator the herbalist and Isidro the fat anatomist. Who discover the fake comatose Firefly – and are his exiling judges, who force him away from his childhood world and home. These two imposing quacks often appear throughout the narrative. They become symbols of Firefly’s paranoia of the world, and become the embodiment of the islands corruption.
From there, our poor Firefly is found by some mystical priestess in a cloth turban, wrapped around her cranium. It is she who takes Firefly to Munificence; who – as her name suggests; runs a charity house. It is there that Munificence offers Firefly a job and a place to sleep. It is there as an errand boy that Firefly begins his surreal misadventures. From falling in love with the redheaded Ada; discovers alcohol; and catches a case of Lethargy cubensis (which is a made up disease, which is cleverly invented to poke fun at lazy drunk Cubans); but from there Firefly is subjected to strange and seedy brothels and nightmarish sex shows. This is all woven in Sarduy’s beautifully composed of mayhem prose, which with barque imagery and surreal logic, creates a very strange and unique world all on its own. It is here that Firefly is set on his journey. A search for his identity; through the landscape of a decadent island. A place populated by slave markets, eccentric characters, and a rotting landscape. It often reads like a, alcoholics three week bender, when the sound of one’s mind is compromised by the liquor in the stomach. It’s that kind of feeling one has when their legs shake, and the body can barely be kept composed on land. When lights flash bye, and faces morph and shape into the most grotesque masks. Sarduy does not allow Firefly, to escape this morally ambiguous world. He keeps him confused and he keeps him lost:
“He sensed in an opaque way, as if he had received an unspoken but fatal warning, that he would always be lost, disoriented, lacking an interior compass, as if the entire Earth were a laborious labyrinth or a perverse mirage of movable walls someone had contrived just to get him lost, to bring him down.”
In this sense Sarduy is incredibly cruel to the poor innocent Firefly. He suffers from the cruel world; from sexual impulses, shameful betrayals a multitude of feelings and instincts in which he cannot understand. By the end of the novel Firefly see’s the truth of the matter. He sees what people are truly capable of. He understands that people can be sold as slaves; children handed over to the inquisition. Firefly’s resentment grows after he breaks free from his disillusioned chrysalis. It is here that Sarduy makes his profound statement clear. Firefly the poor exiled, alienated and lonely creature comes to understand the pessimistic truth:
“Man is the shit of the universe.”
Though the tale is comedic, and has absurd overtones with surreal experiences and baroque imagery, it’s essentially a very cruel joke. Though we are enveloped in the lush beautiful and polyphonic, poetic composed prose – the experiences and message is quite clear. This is a story set in the sunshine and golden rays and palm trees. It’s a place of exotic beauty. Yet it is a where disaster is hidden behind the shudders of the houses. It lurks behind the flamingo pink walls and the sea foam green painted fences and red doors. Where hurricanes come bursting and blowing down the street.
There is a feeling that this novel is a lament to Sarduy’s lost homeland. After Fidel Castro came into power, in nineteen-sixty, Sarduy left the country. He never returned. For the rest of his life he lived in exile, in Paris, a city that welcomed dissident and young writers from all over. It is in this novel that Sarduy writes of exile: exile from his country, its geographical exile, its political exile, the alienation of adolescences and its existential exile, and in many ways the social exile of Sarduy’s sexuality.
This novel though is a pleasure to behold. An even greater pleasure to read. Despite the bleak undertones, Sarduy’s verbosity is wonderful. Full of twists and turns. If you read it out loud it tickles the tongue with its musical capabilities. The juxtaposition of this bleak store mixed with the gold and the pastel seashells, and the beauty of the world, truly is something on its own. Though Sarduy is eclipsed by more well-known Latin American boom writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Fuentes (the three great writers of Latin America) and Jorge Luis Borges – Sarduy is a magnificent treasure to behold. Underappreciated and well accomplished in his form and style. Thanks to Mark Fried and Archipelago Books, which this book was able to be translated into English. It shows a master at his greatest – even before his untimely death.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
