The Iguana

Anna Maria Ortese’s novel, The Iguana, reality and imagination are intertwined with each other, making it more difficult for the reader to distinguish between reality and fantasy. In this story, a rich count who “had not yet married, and had no marital intentions, even in spite of the pressures of his mother the Countess, who had already paid visits to several prominent Swiss families” (3), Count Carlo Ludovico Aleardo di Grees, more commonly known as Daddo, frequently goes on expeditions to search for and purchase islands for his mothers to invest in. “He felt marriage would have limited him, yet one couldn’t say how. He led the simplest life conceivably, the almost monotonous life of a monk.” (3) He also had a greedy friend, Adelchi, who was a publisher. He jokingly suggested to his money centred friend to publish “the story of a madman in love with an iguana.” The count thereafter offers to help his friend find the manuscripts of the story.

In the counts search for his mothers’ island and the poems for his friend, he chanced upon a dismal community of lost noblemen on a hidden and unknown island called Ocana. On arrival, he encounters a bunch of decadently poor aristocrats and their magical maid - the iguana representing the title of the book. He immediately is sympathetic toward that their ill-treated magical servant Estrellita, the Iguana. He subsequently falls in love with her but his feelings are never returned for the iguana’s thoughts are already preoccupied with thoughts of her master Don Ilario. In the end of the book, Daddo neither gets the island nor the iguana and rather goes mad and dies. By the end of the book we see the irony that Daddo went on a quest to look for the story of himself.