Montero may be one of the most under-recognized Latin American writers of our time. In "Deep Purple," as in "The Last Night I Spent with You," she explores primitive worlds, re-imagining them as sexual energy in the insular world of classical musicians. Buried in its pages are the mysteries of human desire; what some may see as a one-note novel is a dizzying work of art.

-- Adriana Lopez

*

Diary, A Novel; Chuck Palahniuk; Doubleday: 262 pp., $24.95

Chuck Palahniuk's fifth novel, "Diary," is at once madly inventive and shamelessly derivative, instructive and infuriating, serious and cartoonish, tender and sadistic. It simply, exuberantly escapes literary categorization. Think Stephen King meets Robert Coover meets Jonathan Swift; that's how a desperate Hollywood pitchman might try to convey the book's mix of flavors to a mogul producer -- a description unlikely to result in a deal.

Palahniuk's legion of die-hard fans needs no pitch for this new tale by the author of "Fight Club," which became a 1999 movie. This book could be as well, because this purported diary of "Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history" is all about the visual: the twinned natures of insight and illusion; and, intrinsic to the convoluted plot, the nitty-gritty of painting.

The complex plot skates on the edge of our disbelief, touching down into plausible cause and effect before soaring into the supernatural. Beneath the gore and pyrotechnics and satire on old blood versus new money, Palahniuk is trying to sift out the connection between misery and inspiration, suffering and access to the collective subconscious, and in the process an amazing range of grist gets swept into his mill: Carl Jung, Jainism, the Essenes, the lethal potential of pigments, masochism and a startling phenomenon called the Stendhal Effect.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

Disaffections: Complete Poems, 1930-1950; Cesare Pavese; Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock; Copper Canyon Press: 380 pp., $17 paper

When Cesare Pavese started publishing in the early 1930s, Italian fascism was at its height. Everything about fascism, not least of all its nationalism, was repugnant to Pavese, who was arrested for subversive activities and sent for three years to a remote town in southern Italy. During his time in the south, which was commuted to eight months, Pavese finished his first book: his sequence of narrative poems, "Lavorare stanca" (literally "working tired," but translated for "Disaffections" as "Work's Tiring"), one of the most singular collections of Italian poetry in the 20th century. Pavese went on to become a celebrated novelist, writing relatively little poetry between 1940 and 1950, when he committed suicide at age 42.