BOOKS
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consciousness or "internal" and "external" psychologism, but private and
public reports of what happened-why and how . We meet some characters
privately before we meet them publicly, and motives or actions are often out
of chronological sequence . Hence a large part of the interest in
Conversation
is
in putting the pieces together, a process of remembering and recognition .
Arrangement, then , of characters and events is the beauty of the book , while
the juxtaposed parts themselves tend toward a purposeful drabness, remind–
ing you not so much of the buzz ofconversation as ofa steady hum, like that of
an electric typewriter turned on and left to run .
Not a difficult book to understand but, precisely, a hard one to read,
Conversation
lacks that flashing imagination evident almost everywhere in the
boom literature. Yet, in its monumental breadth and architecture it is one of
the most important novels to come our of Latin America . By conjoining the
technical flatness of the French New Novel, the simultaneous effect of the fair
scene in
Madame Bovary,
and the spectrum of society from Balzac ,
Conversa–
tion
becomes a halfway house between the social criticism exaggerated in
Asturias and the "pure form" exhibited by Borges; it is a powerful solution to
a problem facing every contemporary novelist in Latin America. And in the
dignity of its solution and the rigor of its method,
Conversation
is a novel
worthy of them all, and of every North American reader as well.
Severo Sarduy' s
Cobra,
on the other hand, explicitly turns its back on the
boom novelists, dismissing them in a footnote : .. if even with these clues,
thick as pOSts, you have not understood .. . abandon this novel and devote
yourself to screwing or to reading the novels of the Boom, which are much
easier." From the start it thumbs its nose at certain writers, and at its own
readers too , but with humor and wit that may compensate for the exaspera–
tion of reading it . For while we may look at
Conversation
as a mature,
intelligent compromise between a literature of commitment and a literature
ofliterature,
Cobra
is uncompromising in pursuing the writer's relation to his
writing , and his writing's relation to his and others ' writing instead of to the
natural world.
The aspiration of the novel and of its transvestite hero clearly transcends
those of commitment:
COBRA . " My God" - on the record player Sonny Rollins, of
course- "why did you bring me into the world if it wasn 't to be ab–
solutely divine? " - she moaned naked on an alpaca rug , among fans and
Calder mobiles.
And as we follow the hero-if indeed we are able-through a bloody meta–
morphosis into a Garbo-like trans-sexual and eventually, I think , into a ritu–
alized corpse , we see that the demands Cobra makes on God are comparable
to
those Sarduy makes on his literature : to achieve a kind of divinity by purity
