To read Salvador Elizondo Alcalde is to enter a dark, difficult, seemingly private realm that does not easily yield its secrets. The author is a stubbornly idiosyncratic and disruptive figure in Mexican and Latin-American literature. His works constitute a kind of intricate and arcane laboratory: they are like a stage upon which he reenacts some of the more radical fictional experiments in the Western tradition, or an operating table upon which he dissects philosophical issues such as pleasure versus pain, nature versus culture, and time and existence in life and in writing. On the surface Elizondo's compositions have very little Mexican or Latin-American about them. Yet he is paradoxically a representative Latin-American or Mexican writer to the degree that he has had to struggle against the imposition of limitations on his art because of his national origins and cultural identity. For the notoriety Elizondo's innovations in fiction have...