SOURCE: "Down and Out in Dublin," in The Observer, June 3, 1990, p. 62.

In the excerpt below, Cunningham offers a mixed review of The Iguana.

Anna Maria Ortese's very bizarre The Iguana features the sea voyage that one Daddo, or Aleardo, Count of Milan, undertakes in search of 'the confessions of a madman in love with an iguana'. He had suggested this zany item to a publisher chum and, lo and behold, on a run-down Edenic Isle owned by a bunch of down-at-heel Portuguese aristos, he finds an iguana and becomes its deranged lover.

The island seems set up as a crucible of magical realisations, and on it desires materialise and the shape-changing metamorphoses of dream multiply entrancingly. But the harsher realities also poke through. The iguana, at once the essence of ageless femininity and provoking virginal girlhood, is also a Carib, a slave, a beast. She is caught up...