Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel
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Book Overview
A striking reassessment of the Don Juan myth. A literary tour de force, this extraordinary novel is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches for Babelle (as Sleeping Beauty) through a linguistic funhouse of puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's Finnegans Wake. A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revellers, while Rios' allusive language shows that words too wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications. Larva revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the English tradition of puns, palindromes and acrostics (a word puzzle in which certain letters in each line form a word or words) and establishes Rios as the most accomplished successor (in any language) to Joyce.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:1564783685
ISBN13:9781564783684
Release Date:November 1990
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Length:545 Pages
Weight:2.10 lbs.
Dimensions:1.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"
Grade Range:Postsecondary and higher
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