PARADISO

by Jose Lezama Lima ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1974

This was called one of the books of the century by La Quinzaine Litteraire, and other readers of its French and Italian and Spanish editions term Lezama Lima a ""Caribbean Proust."" Born in 1910, he has spent his life in Havana, and this is his first novel, although his poetry and criticism have influenced such writers as Julio Cortazar. The novel is a tangle of lacquered monologues and family history -- centered around the youth of Jose Cemi. He is the son of a colonel, and an asthmatic like Lezama and Proust. The title of the book is said to come from Columbus' diary; the mainland of the New World appears during anti-Spanish exile, along with recurrent images of mermaids and sea mammals. Lezama, one of the revivers of Gongora, has an imagery as obsessive as his style is baroque. It ranges from Bosch and Lully to dwarfs and sponges and ""the phallic serpent"" -- centering around voyeurism, homosexual pleasure, and the fearsome vulva--his sexual writing is intense and full of animal symbols. The book's metaphysics of time are less profound than Proust's; time is ""a liquid substance, a mask. . . or just the opposite,"" and the world remains always full of ""sulphuric vapors"" and ""infernal subtlety."" ""Time mocks time"" when a music critic is put into catatonia by his wife and covered with wax to forestall his death, and many characters, if not possessed by lust, have received comparable treatment by Lezama, except that they talk and talk: ""This is the first time you'll hear language made into nature, with all its artifices of allusion and loving pedantry,"" says one to another. Rabassa comments that the original is even more baroque than this painstaking translation, with its latinisms and neologisms. The book is a consummation of preciosity -- undeniably brilliant, intensely perverse.

Pub Date: April 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories: FICTION