 Delany can switch and switch back (especially in "Plagues and Carnivals") from giving a narrative to giving the way a narrative is written.Delany’s style is precise enough to allow us to watch the fundamentally purely verbal way the elements that ground our desires are recombined by language to cleave to the form of the real man or woman who happens to be the object of desire, and shows how obsession with one part or another can lead us again and again beyond borders that we were unaware we had crossed.Indeed, the whole Return to Nevèrÿon series is a rhetorical feast of all-but-inexhaustible richness.