[In the review below, Bick comments favorably on The Iguana.]

First published in Italian in the mid-sixties, Ortese's novel [The Iguana] is set on Ocano, a remote island off the Portuguese coast. Ocano is inhabited by a diverse and fantastic assortment of characters: Don Ilario Jimenes, a marquis given to sumptuous clothing and an enthusiasm for literature; his two rather simian brothers; and the eponymous Iguana, also known as Estrellita.

Bent on discovering lucrative Mediterranean real estate—or manuscripts that can be published for the "moral improvement of the public"—Carlo Ludovico Aleardo di Grees ("Daddo"), a Milanese count and architect, anchors off the coast of the island and soon resolves to rescue Don Ilario from his limited surroundings. In his combination of saintliness and ineptitude the Count resembles Dostoevsky's Prince Mishkin as he also becomes fascinated by the plight of the Iguana, who first appears to him as a "shrunken old woman," then as a pitiful young girl confined in a hideous pit when not performing her duties as serving maid.

Overtones of the Cinderella myth predominate as the Count, convinced that this reptilian creature is beautiful, determines to take her back to Milan where she can be educated appropriately and escape the drudgery of her present situation.

Even though the novel features fairly esoteric discussions between the Count and Don Ilario regarding the dualism at the basis of creation and the meaning of literary realism, The Iguana can also be viewed as a curious type of mystery story where the reader, like the Count himself, must thread his way through "sinister inconsistencies" in order to decide what "mystery" the house conceals.

At a time when minimalist fiction dominates many publishing circles, it is a pleasure to encounter lush descriptions; for example, Ortese describes the sea as taking on "a hue of burnished silver, like the back of a fish." Indeed, the novel has a romantic richness, and the magical strangeness of the island and its inhabitants reminds the reader of such 19th-century poems as "Lamia" and "Christabel." For in The Iguana, as in much Romantic poetry, the line between madness and sanity, reality and imagination, truth and fiction, is blurred.