Status Updates From Babel de una noche de San J...

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.

Strangely more accessible than Finnegans Wake but somehow having less of a “narrative plot”. It’s hilarious that the endnotes are the most traditional aspects of this book.

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.

All this punning and wordplay does get a little tiresome when there's so little plot to support it