Scope and Contents

Cover illustration reproduces a drawing by Severo Sarduy. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This great novel of language "demonstrates, through its faultless rigor and prodigious capacity for linguistic invention, that the routes of Sterne and Joyce, Rabelais ad Celine, Cabrera Infante and Sarduy are in fact perfectly usable." Severo Sarduy writes,"the myth of Don Juan could be the background o Larva in a swirl of eloquent masks.First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed "an instant postmodern classic, without a doubt the most disturbingly original Spanish prose of the century" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1985 Book of the Year), Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches for Babelle (as Sleeping Beauty) though a linguistic fun house of polylingual puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revelers, while Ríos's punning and allusive language shows that words too wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of...