Written on a Body

Sarduy has written primarily in exile and under the aegis of contemporary French intellectual and cultural movements. His essays are dense speculations about the complex structure of contemporary culture, a line of inquiry that forms the basis of his highly wrought fiction. He explores individuals and situations as the intersection of multiple levels of cultural formation enacted (unconsciously by the characters) in even the most menial actions and events. Stripped down to their narrative core, Sarduy's novels typically deal with the quotidian, but the quotidian figured in a richly textured language that is as difficult to read as his cultural formations are to understand. Moreover, Sarduy has been especially audacious both in depicting taboo (panerotic sexualism, homosexuality, transvestism, and transgressive "gender bending" in general) and in demonstrating taboo's irrelevance to daily life. In Sarduy's vision, the lines drawn between taboo and transgression, the conventional and the deviant, are not real. In one sense, Sarduy's writing is quintessentially Cuban in themes and tone, while at the same time one of the best examples of Latin American late modernism. 020