Rambling Raconteur’s Reviews > Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel > Status Update

Chaotic enumeration is followed by an explicit reference to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

More references to Finnegans Wake, Casanova, with Salome and Messalina tossed in for good measure. There’s a sense of libidinously chaotic enumeration.

And we have the most explicit shout to Finnegans Wake: “Given! a way a lone a lost a laved a long the . . . nurre vir!”

I’ll be curious to see Don Juan’s final metamorphosis. Will he be dragged to hell, à la Mozart and Marlowe or cycle through lusty love as in Goethe?

Nice to see Ríos drawing on the links between Faust and Don Juan in the Shadow section. A French fragment that phonetically reads “Mephistopheles” is quite the touch.

Ríos includes so many allusions on each page. The book is a bizarre version of Borges’ “Library of Babel”, an accumulation of fragments, scraps, and epigrams from centuries of literature.

If you enjoy a portmanteau or twelve, on every page, this is for you: Finnegans Wake + JR and prefiguring Infinite Jest with a dash of Gravity’s Rainbow, Maldoror, and the Don Juan side of Faust’s coin.

I enjoy a verbal puzzle, though some of these moves are a stretch.