"The Salad Girl" may be read as a picaresque tale with a contemporary feminist heroine.
Sexual fiction is not to everybody's taste. However, "The Salad Girl" belongs to an honourable tradition of erotic literature, with the author signalling some of the classics of the genre which have inspired his story: Bataille, Anaïs Nin, Apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Verges (1907) and Roald Dahl's My Uncle Oswald (1979). At key moments there are also references to two masterpieces of high literature containing sexual themes: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (199). There is also a reference to Alice in Wonderland (1865), which, in the context of Esteban Bedoya's story, raises the spectre of the unwholesome feelings that Lewis Carroll is supposed to have harboured toward the little girls who inspired his novel.
On the one hand, this catalogue constitutes a particoloured tapestry which adds a wealth of meaning to "The Salad Girl". On the other hand, each reference is clarified and enriched by its relationship to the rest of the text, which comprises an organic unity composed by a gifted storyteller. For example, Death in Venice tells the tragic tale of a prestigious, ageing writer who falls obsessively in love with a beautiful adolescent boy, while Disgrace recounts the harrowing story of a white, middle-aged professor who enters into a fraught relationship with young female student, who may be black or coloured. In both cases the affairs derail the lives of the male protagonists, just as his affair with Giselle throws Carlos's life into turmoil. In this way, the creative reader is invited to read "The Salad Girl" in the light of the tell-tale parallels with Death in Venice and Disgrace.