Philosophies with legs, academics abstracted from academia, a fervor of dialogue and an idleness of musing, an anti-novel insistent upon self-discovery and a little man thinking himself into oblivion. Augusto strains to understand-the nature of love, of women, of self-but for all his talk-for he never ceases to talk-he manages only to, in straining for sense, leave himself senseless. At its best it brims with humorous wit, at its worst it drags with dry tedium, but it is always unique, and well worth the read. The work leaves me with the impression that if all of language is a construct, and we realize ourselves through language, then we are ourselves fictions. A book thus steeped in such linguistic self-realization really ought to be read in its own context, in its own language, but, having no intention of learning Spanish, this is the best I'll ever manage.

The letter from Eugenia is, by the way, one of the funniest missives in fiction.