SOURCE: "Scale Tales," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 245, No. 19, December 5, 1987, pp. 688-90.

In the excerpt below, Klawans favorably reviews The Iguana.

First published in 1965, The Iguana belongs to a long and uproarious Mediterranean tradition of philosophical fables. In these tales, the natural world doesn't behave quite properly, perhaps because the human world misbehaves toward it. Sexual urges, the class structure, the imponderabilities of weather, the disturbing texture of the dinner set before you on the table—all come into question through some fantastic, alluring break in the animal world's order. Natural History, a vampire story by the Catalan writer Joan Perucho, is a good contemporary example: ironic, ornate and light in touch…. The Iguana is another. It's the novel that might have come about had Jane Austen sat down to rewrite The Good Soldier and got the pages mixed up with The Metamorphosis.

The story begins, appropriately...