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. ( )