La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Deep Vellum, 418 pages, March 15)"La Superba"- an apt nickname for the labyrinthine, kaleidoscopic city of Genoa. As one of Pfeijffer's characters elaborates, this nickname has many meanings: "superb and reckless, beautiful and proud, alluring and unapproachable."
Thus are we thrown into the meta-novel that is La Superba, a work concerned with identity and reinvention, immigration, loss, language, writing, and the murky territory of love and sexuality. Pfejffer has made himself the narrator, and the novel we hold in our hands is, according to him, simply a compilation of letters that he writes to an unidentified friend back home in the Netherlands. He often says something like "if I wrote this novel, I would change x or y," which never fails to give the reader a very slight but noticeable case of literary vertigo.
