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A review by korrick
The Iguana (Revised) (Revised) by Anna Maria Ortese
2.0
I don't understand the point of this book. There's a possible point to it that I understand all too well, but it's such an odiously neurotypical one that I am hesitant to write Ortese off so completely without further inquiry. However, it's rather disappointing that, once again, all the woe and self-acrimony and pitiful horror spawns, for all intents and purposes, directly from the acrid bowels of ableism. If that is truly the case, the magical realism is little more than a fart of failed ethos masquerading as deep religious and social insight into the thoughts of wealthy able people agonizing over whether having equitable, or even romantic, relationships with disabled people amounts to bestiality. A nasty interpolation to be fair, but the last dozen pages or so supports this as much, making my musings on the queer nature of a possibly academic presentation of the furry (in this case scaley) community devolve into disgust. A let down, to be sure, and I'm not if all of Ortese's self proclaimed obfuscations are enough to save her.
I was, I admit, scrambling for a centerpiece for the majority of the narrative. I took refuge in the idea of a Shakespearean Tempest inspired piece, especially in the customary obsession with Italy running through it all, but I still found the wild oscillations of feelings and events, escalating as it did as the narrative progressed, without the value of either entertainment or deeper complexity. Things came to a hallucinatory head as the protagonist literally goes out of body in order to recount the narrative, but as previously mentioned, much like Faulkner, Ortese's writing suffers when it's too clear in its confabulations. I don't fuck with people who use comparisons of disabled people to monkeys or lizards as vehicles for bloated commentary on general humanity, and if that's the lazy rhetorical tool Ortese relied on to tie everything together, she would've been braver to fully commit to the bestiality trope than to drag the disabled community into it. As said, the narrative is convoluted enough that perhaps that's not what the narrative entailed at all. However, I've read enough 'difficult' books to have some measure of confidence in my abilities.
The fact that this book ended much more nastily than expected is even more bitter due to the fact that I know I paid near full price for it, judging by the UCLA bookstore sticker on the back cover. I'd have a harder time with disliking so many of this year's choices if I hadn't gotten the majority of them for a few quarters and a song, so there's benefits to the sporadic and repetitive nature of my book acquiring habits. I'm also fatigued because I know that merely one, if that, review of this book will touch on the sordid nature of its penultimate pages, and all the rest will either marvel or fall before the novel's erratic structure, taking the architectural fripperies as something which can excuse any and all of the novel's other attributes. A shame, really, I'm always looking to support women in translation, but this work seems wildly overrated, at the very least.
I was, I admit, scrambling for a centerpiece for the majority of the narrative. I took refuge in the idea of a Shakespearean Tempest inspired piece, especially in the customary obsession with Italy running through it all, but I still found the wild oscillations of feelings and events, escalating as it did as the narrative progressed, without the value of either entertainment or deeper complexity. Things came to a hallucinatory head as the protagonist literally goes out of body in order to recount the narrative, but as previously mentioned, much like Faulkner, Ortese's writing suffers when it's too clear in its confabulations. I don't fuck with people who use comparisons of disabled people to monkeys or lizards as vehicles for bloated commentary on general humanity, and if that's the lazy rhetorical tool Ortese relied on to tie everything together, she would've been braver to fully commit to the bestiality trope than to drag the disabled community into it. As said, the narrative is convoluted enough that perhaps that's not what the narrative entailed at all. However, I've read enough 'difficult' books to have some measure of confidence in my abilities.
The fact that this book ended much more nastily than expected is even more bitter due to the fact that I know I paid near full price for it, judging by the UCLA bookstore sticker on the back cover. I'd have a harder time with disliking so many of this year's choices if I hadn't gotten the majority of them for a few quarters and a song, so there's benefits to the sporadic and repetitive nature of my book acquiring habits. I'm also fatigued because I know that merely one, if that, review of this book will touch on the sordid nature of its penultimate pages, and all the rest will either marvel or fall before the novel's erratic structure, taking the architectural fripperies as something which can excuse any and all of the novel's other attributes. A shame, really, I'm always looking to support women in translation, but this work seems wildly overrated, at the very least.