This great novel of language "demonstrates, through its faultless rigor and prodigious capacity for linguistic invention, that the routes of Sterne and Joyce, Rabelais ad Celine, Cabrera Infante and Sarduy are in fact perfectly usable." Severo Sarduy writes,"the myth of Don Juan could be the background o Larva in a swirl of eloquent masks.First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed "an instant postmodern classic, without a doubt the most disturbingly original Spanish prose of the century" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1985 Book of the Year), 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) though a linguistic fun house of polylingual puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revelers, while Ríos's punning and allusive language shows that words too wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications. Larva's tale, a reassessment of the Don Juan myth in our time, is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. It revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the Madhatter English tradition of puns, palindromes, and acrostics, by creating Joycean echoes and pushing language to its maximum connotative capacity. "[Larva is] a swirl of eloquent masks, a repertory of parody and picaresque in its most unruly nocturnal dialect: satrap cardinals, crazy nuns with pig faces, inquisitors, tightrope walkers, and magicians, popping up among apocryphal evangelists and music books, with flamenco steps, in a chain of figures: succession of silhouettes and also an overlapping of tropes; a carnival chorus and catalog of rhetoric.""”Severo Sarduy -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.