Domar a la divina garza

Judging by the experience of this novel's eccentric narrator, attempting to tame a divine heron proves an undertaking as arduous as it is inevitably doomed to failure. A few episodes of the dark struggle between the unpredictable Marietta Karapetiz and the foolish lawyer Dante C. de la Estrella form the core of this unusual and delightful tale. The conflict that erupts from the very moment the two characters meet, even before exchanging a single word, could be seen as a metaphor for certain classic antagonisms, those revealed, for example, between restraint and incontinence, solemnity and carnival, asepsis and the sewer, sentimentality and mambo, or, in other words, it could reflect the harsh coexistence of orality and writing. The entire narrative unfolds in a thin, fragrant, scatological mist, where the two aspects implied by the term—the investigation of the sacred and the excremental refuge—play a fundamental role. An Istanbul that dreams of being phantasmagorical but remains merely a cliché, the vehemence of mysterious celebrations in a clearing in the Mexican jungle, the protagonists' tireless and capricious discourse, Gogol's agony and death, the echoes of a popular, modestly picaresque, Rabelaisian tradition, the love of language, the absurdities of reason, the ambiguous splendor of all revelry—these and several other things, which the attentive reader will enjoy discovering, make up this outlandish novel that can be read in one sitting, punctuated by unexpected bursts of laughter.