[Charyn is an American educator, novelist, screenwriter, and critic. In the following laudatory review of Cobra, he briefly summarizes the events depicted in the novel and concludes: "Of course Cobra isn't for everybody."]

Cobra is a mystery show staged by transvestites in disturbingly familiar cities that may, for all we know, belong to an alien universe that is about to crash into us. The personae are constellations that explode into various shapes throughout the book.

Cobra, Severo Sarduy's hero-heroine, begins life as a mummy, a wax doll in a "lyrical bawdyhouse." Here she performs and sleeps, "imprisoned in machines and gauze, immobilized by threads lascivious, smeared with white facial creams." The other dolls, Dior, Sontag, and Cadillac, are jealous of Cobra, the "queen" of the "Lyrical Theater of Dolls." The Madam of the bawdyhouse, the creator and protectress of the dolls, "would look them over, stick on their eyelashes and an O.K. label for each, and send them off with a slap on the backside and a librium."

But Cobra's existence does not reduce itself to simple questions of mechanics. She is more than a doll "who opens and closes her eyes, who urinates and everything, with real hair." Cobra has been "pricked with ardor," and "humanized by force of whacks and slaps." Like Caracas, the inflatable doll in Tommaso Landolfi's remarkable story, "Gogol's Wife," Cobra complains about her new, brittle humanness. Griping to the Madam, she says: "Why did you bring me into the world if it wasn't to be absolutely divine?" Fussy, particular, she demands a change of sex, for which she travels to a mysterious abortion clinic that may or may not be located in Tangier.

Accordingly, Cobra enters the second part of the novel as a kind of teddy boy who takes up with a motorcycle gang from a cosmic Amsterdam. The gang members, who assume totemistic names, seem to be reincarnations of the dolls out of the bawdyhouse that Cobra inhabited earlier in the book. Cobra is mutilated and destroyed by the gang in a kinky religious ceremony. But there is little need to mourn. By the end of the novel, Cobra may have become an embodiment of Shiva, the elusive Hindu deity of destruction and creation: "His arms, swift propellers, shaking the world, a peevish god dances."

Sarduy's book defies specific meaning or single-minded interpretation. It is a novel that embraces opposites. It takes the entire cosmos as its subject, adheres to mutilations and swift changes, and deals with the disintegration and rebirth of worlds. "A file of black zebras striped white" can be seen as "a file of white zebras striped black." Ktazob, the godlike abortionist who performs Cobra's sex operation, "hides in the most visible, in the center of the center." Sarduy disallows any satisfying permanence in his definition of humankind. "Neither word nor object," man moves "in his own yellow world of successive circles."

Perhaps Sarduy is suggesting the ultimate mutability of all human landscapes. Sarduy's transvestite is almost as indefinable as Thomas Pynchon's heroine V.: both creatures bump through time and space to manufacture the illusion of history for themselves. A Cuban novelist living in Paris, Sarduy may be defining himself in terms of interior exile; existence, according to Pynchon and Sarduy, seems to be movement toward the inanimate, and the stylized props of a nightmare. Sarduy's syntax becomes the modulations of a scream, a bitter cry that is shaped and controlled by laughter and a sense of dread.

Language is everything in Sarduy's book. It has few contemporary counterparts. If anything, it resembles the dreamscapes of Rimbaud's Illuminations, but with a further twist: Sarduy's fictions are hallucinatory prose poems that melt into one another. It is the rightness of an image, the powerful beat of a sentence, that keep Cobra alive. His sentences surprise; the rhythms confound and startle us, and exhaust us, with a frightening beauty: "Beneath the striped halo of street lights, blue rectangle, the store windows frame fruit baskets full of apples, pastry bowls dripping honey, kitchen boys with starched white caps, iron ovens where stuffed with almonds, surrounded by laurel wreaths, whole animals revolve." (Starting with hints of a benign world, with halos and blue rectangles, and moving through an abundance of almonds, honey and fruit, Sarduy's sentence ends on a spit, with roasting animal flesh.)

Sarduy is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake, and explode. But if Cobra is a magical juggling act, of image balancing dangerously upon image, the translation is as remarkable as the book itself. Suzanne Jill Levine has managed to snare Sarduy's sense of play, all his conundrums and fabulations, and a good many of his Spanish puns, with a gorgeous transference of rhythms from one language to another.

Of course Cobra isn't for everybody. It's an "aphasic opera," a skitterish text devoted to lyrical noise, snaking music, and passionate silences. For those who desire fiction that is unsoiled, that has reasonable insights, a pleasant story, and identifiable characters, stay away from Cobra. It is crafty, slippery and poisonous.