[In the excerpt below, Klawans favorably reviews The Iguana.]

First published in 1965, The Iguana belongs to a long and uproarious Mediterranean tradition of philosophical fables. In these tales, the natural world doesn't behave quite properly, perhaps because the human world misbehaves toward it. Sexual urges, the class structure, the imponderabilities of weather, the disturbing texture of the dinner set before you on the table—all come into question through some fantastic, alluring break in the animal world's order. Natural History, a vampire story by the Catalan writer Joan Perucho, is a good contemporary example: ironic, ornate and light in touch…. The Iguana is another. It's the novel that might have come about had Jane Austen sat down to rewrite The Good Soldier and got the pages mixed up with The Metamorphosis.

The story begins, appropriately enough, with the quest for a good story. The protagonist, a young Milanese count nicknamed Daddo, is about to sail his yacht up the coast of Portugal, really for pleasure but ostensibly for business. His mother, who has an acumen Daddo lacks, wants him to locate some property suitable for development as a resort. Daddo's compliance with her is half-hearted; but he catches fire when his best friend, a publisher who lives off Daddo's generosity and the glamour of the avant garde, asks him to look for manuscripts on his travels. "Why don't you run me down something really first rate," he asks, "something maybe even abnormal?" Without thinking, Daddo replies, "How about the story of a madman in love with an iguana?"

No sooner said than done—and guess who the madman turns out to be. Daddo sails to a miserable little island called Ocaña, where he immediately encounters the heroine of the tale: a lizard who is the sole domestic servant of a Brazilian marquis and his ruined, dissolute family. The lizard's name is Estrellita. When Daddo makes her a present of a scarf he'd bought in Seville for his mother, a tear falls from her "mild, imperceptible eyes…. Actually, the tear had to rise, since her eyelids, like those of all iguanas, opened exclusively from the top."

No matter the direction of the tear, Daddo is soon in love with her, and is alarmed by the circumstances of her life. She is worked cruelly and paid with stones (which she avidly hoards), and there seems to be some guilty secret to her relationship with the marquis. Daddo struggles for pages on end not to admit the obvious to himself: that Estrellita may have been seduced and then abandoned to drudgery. Worse still, there is guarded talk of a Mr. Cole, who runs a British circus and may be interested in a certain purchase. Daddo decides he must act.

Screwing up his courage, he follows Estrellita to the chicken shack that serves as her bedroom. He takes her little hand in his own and asks, "Wouldn't you like to dress up in a lovely veil … and come away to Europe?" When she tells him no, he begins unhappily to survey his situation:

Here I am in the middle of the night on a desert island called Ocaña, walking up to a chicken coop and asking a tribulated young Iguana whether she'd like to get married and come with me to Europe. She's still too young for any interest in a thing like that, and I've forgotten my own intentions. I've been thinking all along of my duty to assume the role of a father in her life. The world contains quite enough husbands already. Even too many, and no fathers at all, as far as I've been able to tell. There's an obstacle remaining in this case, too: is it possible in fact for an immortal spirit to make itself understood in a dialog with irrational Nature? And what is it, this thing I'm calling Nature? Is it good or evil? What are its needs and demands and expectations? It's clear that Nature suffers … and requires our help. But can such a thing be possible without risking eternal death?

This mad outburst erupts in what is still the early part of the novel. Already, Anna Maria Ortese has called up the myths of the tortured aristocrat; the abused brute; the false innocent who cannot admit his desires; the blameless sinner caught helplessly in her sins; and, above all, the myth of the human soul. As Daddo guessed before he set out on his voyage, these are the demented stories we like to tell ourselves, and which we easily enter. There are a lot more of them, too. As Ortese spins them out, she sometimes drops her mask of genial satire, but never falls into the routine or the expected. Her tone and timing are often disconcerting, but they're unfailingly sure—much like the instincts we so admire in soulless Nature.