From poetry, to essay, to drama and the novel, Severo Sarduy's works span a literary horizon that is unconventional and enigmatic. Characterized by his complex view of the baroque in Latin-American literature, which he terms neobaroque; his questioning of the capacity of language to mediate between reality and fantasy, in association with the structuralists; and his renovative interpretation of orientalism in Latin-American literature, Sarduy's work moves beyond the time-honored structures of genres--the traditional novel, for example--to establish another sense of the literary. His experimentation with language is examined in his collections of essays and is practiced in his poetry, but it is with his novels that Sarduy has achieved international acclaim. Sarduy's ruminations on the signifier/signified relationship in language brings him into close contact with the structuralists of the Tel Quel group in Paris and the work of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theories on carnivalized literature...