[In the following review, Case claims that Cocuyo exhibits a "dense, multilayered, and distinctly neobaroque style, parody, and metaphoric structure."]

Severo Sarduy is a writer of many talents. He is a recognized art and literary critic and a member of the Tel Quel group as well as an accomplished novelist, essayist, and poet. Born and raised in Cuba, Sarduy studied medicine before moving to Madrid and subsequently to Paris, which he made his home. His first novel, Gestos (1963), blended avant-garde techniques with Cuban sensitivity; De donde son los cantantes (1969), the highly acclaimed Cobra (1972), Big Bang (1974), and other works followed, in which Sarduy elaborated and expanded his complex and multifaceted literary world.

For Sarduy followers, Cocuyo will satisfy their appetite for his dense, multilayered, and distinctly neobaroque style, parody, and metaphoric structure. The narrator relates of Cocuyo's early shock in life, toppled while performing one of man's most private acts, to his being torn from a comfortable bourgeois existence by a storm, which lands him in a hospital run by quacks, from which he flees to live with La Bondadosa in a girls' school where he runs errands for an office. He finally reaches the real world of the port district. His jarring voyage into maturity is marked by his first notions of fear, his awakening to his own sexuality and to his love for Ada, and a cruel introduction to the horrors of life with all its inequities and injustices.

Cocuyo's (his name means "firebeetle") odyssey through the timeless pre-Castro Cuban world conjured from some collective memory is a Candide-like (or perhaps better, picaresque) trial of discovering the world as it really is. Cocuyo's dreamlike meanderings include a descent in a Gothic tower and travel aboard a Spanish bergantín loaded with African slaves. Admittedly, he suffers from oniromanía familiar, but he gradually emerges from this state to a superclarity brought on by falling into a quagmire and helplessly flailing about in it. From an innocent and detached view of humanity he comes to see man's fate as his own. He is grateful for this epiphany, for it shows him "el verdadero rostro del hombre, su esencial doblez, su necesidad, tan insoslayable como el hambre o la sed, de trampa, de mezquindad." On an optimistic note, he looks up and sees the stars still in their orbits.

Sarduy has skillfully followed in the footsteps of his Cuban masters José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier. His pessimism is perhaps a little worn, if not still strikingly true, for the last decade of the twentieth century, but the message takes second place to the brilliance of his metaphorical images, tirelessly crafted to produce expressions that evoke a mythical and magical world.