"The Lizard's Tail" by Luisa Valenzuela is an exotic roman à clef based loosely on the life of José López Rega, one of Isabel Perón's despotic ministers. Yet much more than fictionalized biography, the novel is a baroque and parodistic fantasy centered on and in the mind of a nameless mad Sorcerer. In this plotless, rambling and episodic novel, Miss Valenzuela attempts to plumb the depths of unmitigated evil by examining the Sorcerer's frenzied and bizarre machinations. From his stream-of-consciousness monologues, sometimes called his novel or diary, and from Miss Valenzuela's first- and third-person narration, the reader gradually pieces together the life story of this unusual personage—his childhood, his usurpation of power, his expulsion by the military, his plot to return to power and his demise, prophesied on the book's first page, in a river of blood.

Any summary is, however, misleading, as is the use...