Mr. Lind is playing Jonathan Swift. His original island was Vienna, and his own original speech was German. "Travels to the Enu" is the first book he has written in English. After all the jokes—at the expense of the Portuguese, logical positivists, thinking in French, "human engineering," Ionesco and the origin of the species—he is being very serious about language and literature. He is a Swift who, disconcertingly, giggles and then gargles.

Language is garbage; the Enu eat pages. Someone observed: "We are choking to death on verbs and nouns." Someone else reminds himself, "But I am talking to the wrong ears," Algebra is understood to consist of "incomprehensible numbers and letters no one can decipher." Nobody among the Enu can manufacture the paper on which he might write. These refugees are estranged from "the elementary prose of existence, like eating, drinking, and excreting." We are...