[In the excerpt below, Cunningham offers a mixed review of The Iguana.]

Anna Maria Ortese's very bizarre The Iguana features the sea voyage that one Daddo, or Aleardo, Count of Milan, undertakes in search of 'the confessions of a madman in love with an iguana'. He had suggested this zany item to a publisher chum and, lo and behold, on a run-down Edenic Isle owned by a bunch of down-at-heel Portuguese aristos, he finds an iguana and becomes its deranged lover.

The island seems set up as a crucible of magical realisations, and on it desires materialise and the shape-changing metamorphoses of dream multiply entrancingly. But the harsher realities also poke through. The iguana, at once the essence of ageless femininity and provoking virginal girlhood, is also a Carib, a slave, a beast. She is caught up in the dizzying aesthetic that inspired Velázquez, but she's also Caliban, focus of evil fantasies, subject to the purchasing power of some Americans and the jailing threats of a menacing circus-owner from England.

This strange account of the barmy count's odd quest is not, it has to be confessed, without a decided power to irk. Much of it reads like magic realism with the juice extracted. But it retains enough vigour to keep you reading, if only to find out how it might end.