The Iguanas of Heat

The Iguanas of Heat (2019) is the companion novel to Warm Arctic Nights, the two titles JEF released the same year. Where the memoir looks back at a wartime childhood, this one turns outward into menace.

The premise is spare: a woman possessed by an inexplicable hatred for her husband plans his death on their forthcoming trip to Mexico, and the plan is unwittingly facilitated by a young girl with whom the husband falls in love. Yuriy Tarnawsky lets the apparatus of motive stay missing; the hatred has no stated cause. The publisher's jacket sets the book beside John O'Hara, John Hawkes, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Ann Quin, and calls it lyrical, emotional, and compulsively readable.

Tarnawsky built his late fiction on the compressed form he called the mininovel, where the gaps left open turn the reader into a co-author of the book.