Recital of the dark verses

Fabre's delightful debut novel follows three 16th-century civil servants tasked with transporting the body of Carmelite poet and mystic Juan de la Cruz. In 1592, a bailiff and his two aides, Ferrán and Diego, bring de la Cruz's corpse from a monastery in Úbeda, Spain, to his final resting place in Segovia. Along the way, they're threatened by rabidly righteous peasants, possibly supernatural specters, and sinister shepherds. The decaying semi-saint gives off an apparently alluring aroma, though none of its carriers notice. In one evocative and amusing episode, several women demand to see the perfumes they suspect the men are smuggling, and the trio devise a beauty competition parodying the Greek myth of Discord (in which a battle between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite over an apple leads to the Trojan War) in order to escape. Told in dizzying prose, the novel recalls the ribald works of Rabelais and Boccaccio; the sacred and profane share a bed and no one is spared from satirical skewering. Ferrán wryly pontificates about de la Cruz's poetry: "I say only that if eager are we to liken verses to miracles, I have heard miracles finer and fuller pass the lips of young men in taverns." Translator Cleary expertly renders Fabre's clever sentences without convoluting their lyricism. Though the hapless leads Ferrán and Diego are occasionally more annoying than endearing, their relationship satisfyingly evolves in the surprisingly earnest conclusion. The result is both a canny send-up of canonization and an earnest homage to de la Cruz's verses. (Sept.)