Firefly

by Severo Sarduy, Mark Fried (Translator)

Overview

Firefly is a dream-like evocation of pre-war Cuba, replete with hurricanes, mystical cults and slave-markets. The story is the coming-of-age of a precocious and exuberant boy with an oversized head and underdeveloped sense of direction, who views the world as a threatening conspiracy. Told in breathless and lyrical prose, the novel is a loving rendition of a long-lost home, a meditation on exile, and an allegory of Cuba’s isolation in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935744917
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	312 KB

About the Author

Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), Cuban poet, fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic, is considered one of the best prose artists of the twentieth century. In 1972, he was awarded the Prix Médicis for Cobra, one of his six highly acclaimed novels. Sarduy also painted, hosted a radio program, and, as an editor at Editions du Seuil, introduced contemporary Latin American fiction to European readers. Sarduy was a leading intellectual in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Mark Fried is the translator of Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days, Mirrors, Voices of Time, Upside Down, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Walking Words, and We Say No. He is also the translator of the historical collection Echoes of the Mexican-American War and works by Emilia Ferreiro, José Ignacio López Vigil, Oscar Ugarteche and Rafael Barajas Durán.

Read an Excerpt

So no one will know i’m afraid

Wait, who is that guy with the big head? Firefly? My god, I thought he’d be more developed, not so skinny. I had imagined him sort of like a tiny Greek athlete with clear glass eyes and gold nipples. I find him like this, all of a shocking sudden, squatting on his clay chamber pot, the pale gray one with two handles, atop a dark green cistern in the shade of a royal poinciana collapsing from the weight of the cockatoos. The first thing I see is his oversized head. And his eyes are so Chinese, he might as well not have any. A bald Chinaman. When he spreads his little arms, his chest is really scrawny: a spidery map of bones. Instead of getting off the pot, he holds tight to both handles and lets himself slide down the cistern, and the basin shatters into more bits of ceramic than you’d find in a Julian Schnabel self- portrait. The cheeks of Firefly’s bottom are two purple splotches when he dashes across the various blues of the floor tiles, screaming at the top of his lungs.The three aunts are in such a tizzy from his descent you would think they’d seen a polka-dotted bear cub riding a chariot down a steep brambly slope.The aunts: all in shining silk. There must be some baptism to attend, or a small parish celebration. They gleam so in the noonday sun that you have to squint to look at them. That isn’t all: crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing. The make-up is simple: a bit of powdered eggshell does it, plus a purple touch of Mercurochrome on the lips. Yes, it must be a catechism klatch, or maybe the arrival from the mother country of some buff parish priest whose photograph they’ve seen, the longed-for replacement of the insipid confessor of bilious believers his predecessor turned into after half a century of evangelizing against the tide

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Severo Sarduy's Prix Médicis-winning Cobra

Sarduy is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake and explore. —New York Times Book Review

A paradise of words…a marbled iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything…Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, The moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes an reels into bliss. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

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

Severe 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

From the Publisher

The penultimate novel by Cuban author Sarduy (Cobra, 1972, etc.). This book would seem to be a translator's nightmare, but Fried has maintained the dark beauty and mystery of the work, originally published three years before the author's death from AIDS in 1993. Sarduy's circuslike world takes some getting used to. His hero, Firefly, is a young boy growing up in pre-Castro Cuba; in a David Lynch-ian touch, his name relates to his bald and oversized head. The narrative takes the first of many surreal turns in the first chapter, when Firefly puts rat poison in his family's tea to keep them from noticing his fear in a thunderstorm. From there, the story shifts to the charity house where Firefly spends the rest of his youth, under the watch of the conjurer Munificence. His experiences are both disturbing and sensually charged. He watches while Ada, the woman he loves, is ritually bathed in lime juice and then pierced through the ears. His own sexual initiation occurs at the hands of two forceful, oversized creatures of uncertain gender. His first cigar is another kind of initiation, one that sends Firefly into a dream world. The story quickly loses any linear coherence it has, but the flow of images is dazzling and ultimately quite haunting. In the final chapter, Firefly's world is now a wasteland, and he is racked with nausea. The closing image returns to the first chapter's poison episode and is likely the author's vision of Cuba to come: The innocence is now gone, and the violent impulses remain. Rich poetry, elusive plotting and layered images make for an interesting read.

Kirkus Reviews