María Luisa BombalRezensionen

Cuando leí Pedro Páramo, pensé que sería muy difícil para mí encontrar a alguien que alcanzara ese nivel de perfección poética en una novela en español. Hoy, mientras termino La amortajada, me doy cuenta de que ese alguien es María Luisa Bombal.
Este libro es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de los mejores que he leído.

La amortajada es una obra que exhibe un universo onírico y mágico, en el que la realidad y el ensueño se confunden. La voz narrativa de una fallecida, permite visionar la vida femenina atormentada por el amor

LOS MEJORES LIBROS CHILENOS

An early example of what would be called "magical realism", The House of Mist is set in the early part of the 20th century in Argentina and takes, I think, from both the Gothic and fairy tale tradition. Our awkwardly-named heroine, Helga, begins her story when she is a child, orphaned and being brought up by her aunt and uncle; and, of course, she has a beautiful cousin to be measured against. She knows little of her parents, a mystery that will be revealed over the course of the novel. Helga is a reader and her head is filled with fairy and folk tales when she meets the young Daniel next door, she is looking for a frog prince. She will eventually marry the mercurial Daniel and go to live in his big, isolated, deteriorating (creepy) hacienda in the woods. But Daniel is NO prince and she is not his first wife. And that is not the end of the story.

While the premise has the sound of a fairy tale to it, and its narrative often has a feel of fairy tale, the story is more complex, full of secrets and mystery (and death), and woven into it are visions and illusions that may or may not be reality.

When I began the book, I thought it might be too light for my tastes, but I soon found myself thoroughly captivated by the story. I think, Bombal uses magical realism as tool to change Helga; for as she sorts out illusion and reality, she really comes into her own (perhaps stopping short of being a feminist novel).

Esta mujer escribe que es una delicia. Imágenes de fantasía, soñadoras, emociones, sensaciones. La historia de Maria Griselda, personaje que aparecía en La amortajada y que despertó mi curiosidad por saber mas de ella y que tiene una belleza mágica, es un ser casi irreal. De los demás relatos destaco Mar, cielo y tierra, bellísimo, y La maja y el ruiseñor.
Esta edición contiene también un prólogo muy interesante sobre la autora.

In this elegant classic, recently reissued in the States, Helga, the narrator, is a plain-looking orphan given to flights of wild imagination and a passionate love of life. At seven, while out in the abandoned bramble-filled garden searching for Prince Toad with the small golden crown, she happens upon the enchanted bear in her fairytales. He is as irritable and grouchy as any bear and though he remains abrupt, the 12-year-old Daniel nevertheless condescends to help her look for her Toad. And so he becomes her intermittent, capricious friend.

Years later, after some particularly interesting twists in the tale, Helga marries Daniel, now a rich landowner; but she is his second wife. She is completely devoted to him, as she has been most of her life. He, however, is still passionately in love with his deceased first wife, an unreservedly beautiful woman whose beauty and mysterious death remain the subject of many conversations in society.

Daniel has married Helga merely to save her from a life of servitude to others. As she is brought to her new hacienda set deep in the Chilean woods, they are enveloped by a dense, all-encompassing mist that seems to swallow up the surrounds including the lagoon where Teresa, Daniel's first wife, drowned. There are many moments of sadness, as well as joy, for the new bride who becomes absorbed by nagging questions about Teresa's death. This part of the book was deliciously reminiscent of Rebecca, which was, incidentally, published in 1938, three years after the publication of House of Mist.

Bombal's prose is crisp, and this impressive novel draws you into a fairytale experience replete with palaces in the middle of forests, old-fashioned but luxurious horse-drawn carriages, huge dancing halls, and women resplendent in ball gowns. There is even a witch!

One night, they are invited to a ball, but Daniel refuses to attend. He is happy to let Helga go, and she does so with great exuberance. The next morning, after champagne followed by a night of passion with a romantic and attentive lover, she is wracked with guilt. But she also feels so much more hopeful, alive, and happy. This sets off a whole train of events...

When Bombal first wrote House of Mist (La Última Niebla) in Spanish, in 1935, it was hailed with critical acclaim. Bombal had broken with tradition. For the first time in Latin American novels, heroines portrayed an inner psychological world. Helga's thoughts are fuelled by a fondness for fairytales. At 18, she still dreams of fairies and castles, and has trouble distinguishing between her dreams and reality. This engaging novel abounds with an air of drama and mystery that never lets up, and keeps one guessing right till the end!

This review was first published in Issue 5 of Belletrista: http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue5/anth_3.php

I ordered the book La Ultima Niebla/El Árbol, by María Luisa Bombal, for Christmas, and read the two title stories while at home for the holidays. I was impressed by the perspective that she had as a woman in the early part of the 20th Century. Her stories presented a lot of the themes that I associate with modern feminism, and I can´t say that I entirely expected them to be exhibited in a work from the 1930´s, written by a Chilean. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn´t be surprised, because many of my female Chilean friends that I met while studying in Santiago seemed more feminist than their North American counterparts, so maybe such an early show of feminism from the Southern Cone isn´t so surprising. Furthermore, I´m not exactly an expert on feminist literature, so really what I´m going on here is my reading The Bell Jar in high school and hanging out with women who are liberal and could perhaps be considered feminists. Anyway, the two stories that I read use symbols such as fog and a large, beautiful tree to represent the struggles that women trapped in the boredom of conventional marriage faced. The language is very straightforward and simple, and all the more powerful for being so. The stories are blunt and insistent in showing the frustrations of female life in a world that does not confer them the rights that they know they deserve. In reading the introduction, I learned that María Luisa Bombal spent a lot of her life in Paris and was a pretty cosmopolitan figure. These stories, I believe, were published in Sur, and she had a lot of famous friends. Hell, she dedicated “La Última Niebla” to Oliverio Girondo and Norah Lange. I really enjoyed these stories. I´d been reading novels and needed something that I could read in one sitting, a story with a beginning and an end that were within my grasp over a shorter space of time. And I´m trying to read more female authors, because I feel it´s ridiculous that such a large percentage of my books come from, essentially, half of the population on earth. They´re good stories, they seem revolutionary to me, and they make me think about my friends in Chile. I would recommend them to anyone.

Es una breve novela, dolorosa y apasionada, llena de romanticismo en la cual el protagonista se enamora de una mujer adulta, 83 paginas.

Es una novela en el que realidad y ensueño se confunden con la visiôn de una vida femenina atormentada por el amor, con la voz narrativa de una muerta (la amortajada). 96 paginas.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Maria Luisa Bombal "The mother of magic realism" or something, so I was happy to find a little of her work translated.

With a perface by Jorge Luis Borges