The cover of this book reflects an unresolved tension: the names of Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora occupy most of the space; the subtitle Masters of Parody is almost lost, in small type, even blending its color with the flower motif, at the bottom of the page. Is it a book about Lope and Góngora? About what exactly? (The only aspect indicated in the title is “and”: that these two authors should be joined, rather than opposed.) Or is it a book about how late style and parody are closely interwoven, as the introduction clearly shows (8)? If the book is about the first issue, its strength rests on how it can show that one element of similarity—both authors engage in late style parody—is enough to merit the revision of the established wisdom that considers them opposites. This reading of the book is enriching, like disturbing the paradigm that Obama and Trump are opposites, because, say, both have bombed foreign countries. Of course they are opposites, exclaims the citizen who, from inside the system, chooses to vote between Democrat and Republican. Of course they are the same, says the supposedly radical observer from outside the system, for whom there is little difference between both parties.

But the second possible reading of this book (it is a book about the intimate relationship between late style and parody) presents a perplexing problem—it ignores the most prominent elephant ever to occupy a room: Cervantes. Don Quixote is the ultimate parodic book, parodic of every genre and of itself. And Cervantes wrote most of his work in the late years of his life. As the cover of this book shows, the enticing subject of parody, even in its specific relation to old age and late style, is not at its center. The fundamental insight (parody is related to lateness) is not fully exploited. There is little mention (14) of how Góngora is parodied by Quevedo—a younger author—and others, and no mention of how Lope's plays (for example, El caballero de Olmedo) are parodied a generation later by the likes of Francisco Monteser. This is my praise of Kerr's book. Limiting itself to an issue of secondary importance (Lope and Góngora are more alike than it appears), it sets the bases for a discussion of parody in its roots, as a function of the Baroque in particular, and lateness in general; as a function of the Apollonian-Dionysian flux, as a deconstructive praxis to—paradoxically—construct the self, give art itself a new lease, after the realization—centuries pre-Benjamin—of art's paradox in existing. If a future book includes the elephant, it must follow and extend Kerr's magnificent case analyses.

Profoundly post-Derridean, militant with a love for critical theory, beautifully researched and carefully and elegantly written, this book delivers much more than what it promises to prove. It shows, for instance, “an awareness of kairos in the midst of the endless and shapeless chronos” (193), which is a particularly relevant issue in our own era of empty time, of time as money at the end of times. The readings of the specific poems by Góngora and Lope that the chapters offer are incisive, witty, informed by erudition, and embedded in the seriousness of the ludic. Chapter 1 traces parody as it evolves from “Arrojóse el mancebito” to Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea; chapter 2 concentrates on Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe with an emphasis on the nonsensical ending; chapters 3 and 4 turn to Lope's Rimas de Tomé de Burguillos and La gatomaquia, respectively. If the former is “infrequently what it claims to be” (162), the latter serves Kerr as an ironic platform to link the ephemeral to immortality—as Lope does—through cats, those creatures of nine lives. But all these chapters only set the table for the last one: “Last Laughs.” It is here that the book proves both its thesis and something more radical: that art, as a “realm for the meaningful processing of existence,” inhabits a field of ruins with “the transcendent power of laughter” (192).