A Review of The Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese

A Magical Realist Masterpiece by an Italian Writer

Oct 20, 2009

The Iguana is a magical realist novel full of surprises. It was written in 1963 by Anna Maria Ortese and published two years later.

To anybody who is not familiar with Italian twentieth-century literature, The Iguana comes across as a work capable of appealing to people everywhere in the world. Its themes are in fact oppression and redemption, evil and good, meanness and the search for a noble ideal, and other universal questions.

However, to somebody who is familiar with Italian culture and history since World War II, The Iguana is likely to come across as a stunning blow, a miraculous account of a quest for the roots of what makes people – and not only! – human.

The fact that the story has as its eponymus heroine an animal, an iguana, has been a matter of speculation for many readers. The iguana is an embodiment of the oppressed, whose only hope of liberation is a young idealist count from the progressive Italian city of Milan, who is willing to die in order to save her life and restore her dignity.

The iguana, who was once cherished, has later been discarded and identified with evil itself. Only the count's sacrifice frees her from this fall of grace, by affecting her self-awareness through his love.

The action takes place in an unknown Portuguese island, which is not even mapped. The origins of oppression are thus located in an a-historical dimension, which is both pre-historical and eternally present in human history.

Many are the questions raised by this enigmatic novel. The issue of the relationship between man and nature is one, while the representation of the character of the iguana as both an animal and a degraded woman endorses a reflection on the Other.

Victimization, fascination, repulse come all together in the complex dynamics of the power relations between the oppressor and the oppressed.The latter is represented not as a passive victim but as a reactive victime, using tactics in order to survive.

The last part of the novel brings together contradictory scenes and situations, juggling shifting planes of reality and symbols simultaneously. It is as if the magical realist strategies adopted throughout the text are being exaggerated and brought to work in opposition, by clashing and explosion.

The result is an epistemological indeterminacy which the author also states clearly: the ultimate mystery of human motives and actions cannot be uncovered for good. The Iguana, through the deployment of magical realism, tackles many of the big questions about life and relationships, power and interaction.

It is, at its core, a deeply philosophical novel, written in an enjoyable and exuberant style. And it is a work of love, one the author herself considered as the centrepiece of her whole literary output.

The copyright of the article A Review of The Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese in European Literature is owned by Francesca Aniballi. Permission to republish A Review of The Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.