Volume 22, Number 4 · March 20, 1975
Masquerades
By Michael Wood
Conversation in The Cathedral
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Harper & Row, 601 pp., $12.50
Cobra
by Severo Sarduy, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Dutton, 176 pp., $8.95
Conversation in The Cathedral (published in Spanish in 1969) and Cobra (published in Spanish and French in 1972) seem to represent opposite poles, or opposite possibilities, in Latin American fiction. Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian living in London, I believe, when he wrote the book, has a definite, almost obsessive subject: Peru itself, a loved, ruined, helpless country—'At what precise moment,' we read on the first page of Conversation in The Cathedral, 'had Peru fucked itself up?' and the book replies with a dense report on interlocking Peruvian lives, suggesting that the answer is always, that the precise moment of fuck-up is forever, since the mess is all around and seems, eternal. Sarduy, a Cuban now living in Paris and closely associated with Tel Quel, has no subject, only a set of excuses, of pretexts, springboards for excursions into various territories of imagination and memory.
Review, 2781 words
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