A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town’s famously bizarre “Garden of the Monsters.”

Pier Francesco Orsini, duke of Bomarzo, created a park of monsters in which the nightmares of the Renaissance are preserved, set in stone yet still writhingly alive. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the great Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist recalling the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life from a modern point of view (Freudian psychoanalysis and Lolita both put in an appearance) while ensconced in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez’s own Buenos Aires.

Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of an aristocratic hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain (a portrait so convincing that Edmund Wilson assumed it to be fact). It is also, of course, a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it’s an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—a bit as if Proust were rewriting one of Poe’s Italian tales—as Gregory Rabassa’s translation (out of print for many years) conveys beautifully.