Iguana

I found Ortese’s novel The Iguana a little too absurd for my taste. It seemed as if by delving into the fantastic that it loses its artistic merit. It seems too convoluted to be creative. While the language and the imagery are amazing, it lacks a cohesive story and leaves me nonplus.

Where the fantastic does a good job is it allows itself to have freedom of choice. Yet, that isn’t necessarily a good characteristic to embody if there is not an obvious underlying theme. The courtship of an Iguana can be seen symbolically but it seems to me that this kind of symbolism allows for ridiculous interpretations. This is purely because it lacks the stability of being a true because this type of symbolism is based on largely impossible actions. To relate the impossible to the possible does make us question reality, in the same way that one conducts and experiment. However there isn’t a control like there is in science, only absurdity.