SPANISH.

Lindstrom, Naomi ; Mojica, RafaeI ; Marquez, Ismael P. 等

Fiction

Angelina Muniz-Huberman. El mercader de Tudela. Mexico City. Fondo de Cultura Economica. 1998. 309 pages. ISBN 968-16-5357-2.

A talent for making all of Sephardic culture and history appear mysteriously fascinating animates much of the writing of Angelina Muniz-Huberman. Born in France in 1936 to Spanish Republican refugees and residing in Mexico since early childhood, Muniz-Huberman learned belatedly that her mother's family was an old Sephardic line that had remained in Spain, cultivating a secret and by now vestigial Judaism. The author was struck by the discovery and went about reclaiming her heritage. In the course of educating herself about Sephardic history, folklore, and erudition, she has produced works of popularized Jewish scholarship. She has also reelaborated the same material in her highly imaginative narratives.

El mercader de Tudela is in this latter vein. Muniz-Huberman used historical sources as a point of departure for her re-creation of the life and travels of Benjamin de Tudela. Benjamin is a scholarly Spanish rabbi in the days of the Crusades when the Angel of Truth brings him a cryptic but imperative message. He abandons his studies and congregation to become a merchant-adventurer on a quest for an unclear ideal. His search takes him through Mediterranean Europe, Turkey, the Palestine region, Syria, and Mesopotamia. At times his journey seems to be a quest for extraordinary sights and experiences. The novel follows Benjamin through little-known Jewish communities outside the mainstream, including Samaritans, Karaites, hermits, ascetics, and a sect of astronomer-astrologers. In Cyprus he encounters "la secta heretica de los epicureos," Hellenized Jews. Non-Jewish sects such as the secretive Druse, and miscellaneous adepts of ritual magic, further contribute to the effect of a medieval Mediterranean teeming with arcane communities.

Among the many threads linking Benjamin's adventures is a quest for the secret of writing. Benjamin carries manuscripts on his travels and writes two books, one of waking experiences and another of dreams. However, it proves impossible to seal off any text from any other. Toward the end of El mercader, there are some tricky revelations about the provenance of the narrative which readers have been following. The subplots involving manuscripts and textuality allow Muniz- Huberman to use the cabalistic concepts of writing that she has often adapted in her essays and fiction.

Many of the book's enthralling turns and flourishes involve borrowings from novels of earlier eras. El mercader de Tudela has a number of links to the picaresque, although Benjamin is a quester rather than a rogue. Tie-ins to the novel of chivalry occur through such magical touches as the accounts of travels Benjamin and his sidekick undertake using wings. However, Muniz-Huberman's narrative is marked as modern by, among other features, a typically twentieth- century preoccupation with the fragile construction of identity and an enthralled nostalgia for the Jewish culture that flourished in Spain.

Naomi Lindstrom

University of Texas, Austin

Ignacio Padilla. Si volviesen sus majestades. Mexico City. Nueva Imagen/Patria. 1996 (released 1997). 161 pages. ISBN 968-39-1299-0.

Ignacio Padilla (b. 1968) has been mentioned on several occasions as a member of Mexico's so-called Generacion del crack. Among other things, the term crack is meant to conjure memories of Mexico's financial collapse in 1994, an event that gave these young authors their birthmark as writers of fiction. Most of the crack writers began to publish in their early twenties. However, it was not until 1995 and 1996 that they would start bringing out the novels that brought them as a group to the attention of both critics and public. Except for Pedro Angel Palou (b. 1966), who still lives in Mexico, crack writers are fond of travel and seek residence abroad. This, together with statements they have made in interviews and manifestoes, shows, unwittingly perhaps, their nostalgia for the cosmopolitan life-style of not a few Boom authors, whose heyday was a time when most of these young writers were not yet born. The other three members of the group, besides Padilla and Palou, are Jorge Volpi (b. 1968), Eloy Urroz (b. 1967), and Ricardo Chavez (b. 1961).

All these writers see themselves as "los hijos de la crisis," and theirs is a dystopic writing or, to use their own terms, millennial and apocalyptic. Dystopia and apocalypse are themes already present in the eighties in the works of, among others, Carlos Fuentes and Homero Aridjis. In the nineties, dystopia becomes a central theme in the narrative project of authors a generation older than those in the crack group, such as Francisco Rebolledo (Rasero, 1993; see WLT 70:2, p. 373), Aridjis himself (El Senor de los ultimos dias, 1994), Jose Agustin (Dos horas de sol, 1995), Guillermo Sheridan (El dedo de oro, 1996), and Carmen Boullosa (Cielos de la tierra, 1997).

In the make-believe land of Padilla's Si volviesen sus majestades, there are a king and a queen who unexpectedly give up their kingdom and leave, so we are told, "en un montgolfier de pano verde." The Narrator, an aging courtier and himself the main character in the story, sees in the departure of the royal pair the one event that would radically alter the course of life in the kingdom. Life under the rule of the royal couple had been Utopia on earth; a time when "[la vida] era de miel y bombolinos, [el castillo] era una fiesta interminable y el reino todo parecia tener la gracia y el donaire de una gentil doncella." For the Narrator himself, a third-generation professional existentialist or self-styled seeker of "el senso de la vida," free access to the private chambers of the queen had been until then the answer to his quest. All this changes, of course, when both king and queen drop out of sight. The old courtier is left alone in a deserted castle at the mercy of his demons and victim of the royal trickster, a high-tech wizard and magician.

While the old courtier awaits the royals' return, he is forced to witness the destruction of the kingdom as well as his own spiritual disintegration, victim as he is of a series of enganos at the hands of the royal trickster, a Sancho Panza-type who strongly recalls the character in Cervantes's novel. Confined to the palace in the company of the buffoon, the old courtier starts writing his memoirs. It is a story of spiritual search and failed self-discovery, one in which deceit and delusion are the very fabric of life. This he discovers soon as he puts pen to paper, when he starts to question the validity of writing itself. And here again, he falls victim to the trickster as maker of illusion. At one point the old courtier gives up writing and totally submits to the virtual- reality shows artfully produced by the trickster. Near the end of the novel, the queen at last shows up.

Padilla's narrative deploys a diction and syntax that read as a coarse pastiche of seventeenth-century Spanish authors, most notably the language of Cervantes in Don Quixote. More striking yet are the dialogues between the old courtier and the buffoon, a smart spitting image of the conversations between Don Quixote and his squire. It is no small temptation, in fact, to read Si volviesen sus majestades as one more perverse variation on Cervantes's famous novel, and it is here that one can detect Padilla's most productive discovery as a novelist.

However, for some, Padilla's novel may prove to be an exasperating piece of writing. It not only confronts the reader with a series of seemingly half-cooked enigmas and the monotone intonations of a first-person narrator naggingly addressing his mother, his diary, and his imaginary readers. Padilla's short novel is so excessively fragmented into drafts, folios, journal entries, parts, prefaces, and chapters, that great amounts of reading time go into guessing the possible significance of such mechanical armor, or, even worse, into preposterous efforts to avoid the interference of such structural considerations with the free flow of the story. Padilla's text hits the reader as a panoply of devices demanding to be studied rather than a book to be read.

Si volviesen sus majestades is a good example of a story not telling itself. More than a novel, it should perhaps be read as an allegory, a text wherein almost all the referents are strongly marked as emblematic, a world not chosen by the characters themselves but shaped by the author, an angel of doom.

Rafael H. Mojica

University of Michigan, Flint

Mario Vargas Llosa. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto. Madrid/ Lima. Alfaguara/PEISA. 1997. 384 pages. ISBN 84-204-8263-3/9972-40-090-6.

Since the publication of his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963), Mario Vargas Llosa has accustomed his readers to somber historicist reflections on society and to musings on the tragic role of individuals within it, as in La guerra del fin del mundo (1981) and Historia de Mayta (1984). In others, such as [inverted question mark]Quien mato a Palomino Molero? (1986) and Lituma en los Andes (1993), the Peruvian author presented a disquieting view of the darkest manifestations of human nature when it is overpowered by intolerance and fanaticism. Exceptions to this consistent narrative line were a few sporadic incursions into lighter, humorous subjects such as Pantaleon y las visitadoras (1973) and La tia Julia y el escribidor (1977). The publication of Elogio de la madrastra in 1988 revealed still another new, unexpected facet of his repertoire. An improbable venture for a writer who has often wielded literature as a political weapon, Elogio dealt with situations in which social conventions give way to basic instinct, as was the incestuous sexual relationship between a mature woman and her prepubescent stepson. But rather than dwelling on an otherwise sordid episode, the novel's appeal came from the imaginative treatment of eroticism as a creative force, a theme that Vargas Llosa develops to its maximum expression and carries with refreshed vigor into his latest novel.

Conceived as a sequel, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto takes off where Elogio de la madrastra ended. Dona Lucrecia and don Rigoberto are now separated after he discovers his wife's affair with his son Fonchito. The novel is a progression of events leading to the couple's reconciliation, a denouement in which Fonchito has a disturbing and far from innocent central role. Skillfully playing the part of an endearing cherub, half Cupid, half satyr, he haunts Lucrecia with a relentless persistence that she is unable , or unwilling, to discourage. Rigoberto and Lucrecia's final reconciliation does not, however, resolve the emotional stranglehold in which Fonchito has locked them both. At the end, having achieved his objective, Fonchito still hovers over the couple, wiser and far more rapacious than ever.

In Los cuadernos and Elogio Vargas Llosa has constructed the framework of his stories around masterpieces of painting. If in the earlier work don Rigoberto fanned his erotic impulses by directing Lucrecia in emulations of Titian's Venus, Goya's Naked Maja, and Ingres's Odalisque, in Los cuadernos Fonchito relives the life of Egon Schiele, a Viennese painter of young girls at the turn of the century with whom he has developed an obsessive identification. Following in the footsteps of his father, Fonchito stages some of Schiele's most controversial and suggestive works, cajoling Lucrecia and her housemaid to pose as not-so-reluctant, if embarrassed models.

Availing himself again of the narrative techniques that are his hallmark, Vargas Llosa weaves a parallel story line whose chief protagonist is don Rigoberto. A well-to-do insurance executive in his fifties, with the impeccable manners of a true gentleman, don Rigoberto leads a private life devoted to the task of creating a world of erotic fantasies revolving around his estranged wife. In the seclusion of his studio, he meticulously records in a voluminous set of secret notebooks the most farfetched erotic episodes, real or fictitious-situations in which Lucrecia is at times the willing subject and at others the passive object of his hyperactive imagination. But Rigoberto's notebooks serve a purpose that goes beyond the inventive recollection of wild amorous adventures, an exercise that soothes his nostalgia and provides solace to his self-imposed solitude. In its pages he pens endless proclamations, many in the form of unposted letters, on a variety of subjects that range from the condemnation of feminism, ecology, and sports, to the censure of pornography, pop art, and bureaucracies. For those readers who have followed Vargas Llosa's career as an essayist (a compilation of his journalistic pieces was published in 1994 under the title Desafios a la libertad; see WLT 69:2, p. 333), the subject, tone, and even the exact phraseology of don Rigoberto's diatribes may sound familiar, particularly in the dogmatic exaltation of individual liberties and in the rejection of any form of social or political collectivism that characterizes the writer's ideology.

These, however, are shaky grounds on which to tread, for the author himself has warned us repeatedly that "las novelas mienten-no pueden hacer otra cosa." Mario Vargas Llosa, freely exercising his right to "mentir con conocimiento de causa," succeeds once again in providing his readers with a stimulating, ingenious novel, carefully conceived and crafted, in the best tradition of his brilliant fiction.

Ismael P. Marquez

University of Oklahoma

Verse

Julio Cortazar. Save Twilight / Salvo el crepusculo: Selected Poems of Julio Cortazar. Stephen Kessler, tr. San Francisco. City Lights. 1997. viii + 169 pages. $12.95. ISBN 0-87286-333-6.

Throughout his career, Julio Cortazar (1914-84), like many fiction writers, wrote poems on the sly-on planes, in hotel rooms-but he was reluctant to publish them in book form. Toward the end of his life, however, he agreed to gather these desultory compositions for publication but made no attempt to arrange them chronologically; in fact, he suggested something of a "hopscotch" approach, the reading strategy recommended in his novel of the same name. For Cortazar, literature, like life, was a game, one in which poemas (poems) could become pameos and meopas. The collection finally appeared, posthumously, in a 1984 Mexican edition under the title Salvo el crepusculo.

Drastically reducing the size of the original volume, translator Stephen Kessler has produced, in a bilingual, facing-page format, a sampling that conveys "the range of Cortazar's poetic accomplishment." The individual selections, which traverse the spectrum from the surreal to the mundane, from free forms to traditional ones (e.g., the sonnet), reflect the personal preferences of the translator rather than any objective criteria.

Cortazar the poet advocates living life to the fullest. His poems are meditations on such vital areas as friendship, the aging process, and nostalgia for a lost Buenos Aires and the games of youth. He writes of life's evolution from conformity to the shedding of restraints and celebrates the freedom of individual sexual expression. Many selections deal with matters of love (including its absence), especially the intensity and brevity of physical love. Readers also get a glimpse of the writer's struggles to create a poem and the exile's efforts to re-create himself. In short, the poems reveal how, for Cortazar, art and life are intimately intertwined.

Not surprisingly, Cortazar inserts several prose interludes throughout the volume. These not only display the humor and playfulness that characterize much of his work but also open a window to his thoughts on poetry and the poetic process. These pieces prove, at least in some instances, as interesting as the poems themselves. Discounting the idea that one should not mix prose with poetry (obviously, poetry comes in diverse formats: novels, stories, songs, plays, films), he writes in these mini-essays about the writers who influenced him, the notion that an artist should be free to go against the grain, how poets should not comment on their own work (and then he proceeds to do so), and his unwillingness to trust the literary judgments of others. He concludes with a frank discussion of his battles with insomnia, how he developed a personal mandala to cope with the problem, and how dreams inevitably find their way into his writing.

In this reluctant selection Cortazar allows the reader to become intimate with his innermost thoughts and feelings. Those unfamiliar with Spanish should be grateful to Kessler for facilitating such an esthetically gratifying encounter.

Melvin S. Arrington Jr.

University of Mississippi

Criticism

Poetica de escritoras hispanoamericanas al alba del proximo milenio. Lady Rojas- Trempe, Catharina Vallejo, eds. Miami. Universal. 1998. 244 pages. ISBN 0-89729- 850-0.

Lady Rojas-Trempe is the organizer of Critica Canadiense Literaria sobre Escritoras Hispanoamericanas, an association to coordinate the work of Canadian- based researchers pursuing a women's-studies approach to Spanish American literature. Poetica de escritoras hispanoamericanas, coedited by Rojas-Trempe and her research collaborator Catharina Vallejo, is the first volume produced under the auspices of this organization. It consists of two unlike parts. Pages 9-165 constitute a multiauthored volume of essays on writing (in nearly all cases, poetry) by Spanish American women; most of the critics who contributed essays work at Canadian universities. Pages 166-242 offer a bibliography of Spanish American women poets. Compiled by Rojas-Trempe and Vallejo, this listing gives the names of women poets and the bibliographic data on the (usually) first editions of their works. The bibliography groups poets by nationality, including listings for Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. (These are the countries of origin of the poets discussed in the essays.) It includes as well a section on Spanish American women poets in Canada.

The first part of Poetica de escritoras is like many multiauthored collections of essays in that the quality is uneven and the coverage is somewhat scattered. The volume acquires an extra interest because of its Canadian emphasis. Jorge Etcheverry's "Notas sobre la escritura femenina latinoamericana en Canada" is the article most likely to bring new information to readers. Perhaps a more detailed introduction could have explained why essays on such diverse poets all belong in the same volume; the editors' preface is only a page and a half long.

The bibliographic listings are potentially useful. Beyond any doubt, the first problem facing any would-be reader of Spanish American women's poetry is still discovering who the authors are, beyond the few well-known figures. The listings by country should have been alphabetized, but otherwise the bibliographies are easy to navigate.

Although more introductory and connective material would have been helpful in establishing the volume's unity, Poetica de escritoras hispanoamericanas has an unusual and interesting twist in its Hispanic-Canadian material. The essays are too specialized, and too dissimilar to one another, to warrant the volume's translation into English. The bibliographies are fascinating to browse.

Naomi Lindstrom

University of Texas, Austin

Miscellaneous

Julio Llamazares. Tras-os-Montes (Un viaje portugues). Madrid. Alfaguara. 1998. 326 pages. ISBN 84-204-8190-4.

Spain and Portugal have been described as neighbors who live in a state of mutual indifference, and few authors of either country have written about their fellow Iberians across the border. A welcome exception is this account of a Spanish traveler's motor trip through Tras-os-Montes, Portugal's northeastern region whose very name, "Behind the Mountains," suggests a rugged, little-known land. In his sensitive (and well-received) portrayal, Julio Llamazares blends a number of genres, as befits a writer whose ten works to date encompass poetry, narrative fiction, travel memoirs, and collections of articles written for the press. His latest title is narrated in the third person and presents a protagonist known simply as "the traveler," an educated ("perhaps excessively so for these times") compulsive wanderer who dislikes museums, armies, and modern commerce. He is, however, a passionate observer of people, and in this narrative he proves to be an engaging visitor who makes friends readily despite varying degrees of linguistic communication with the natives.

Llamazares divides his book into five parts, each covering a specific area seen in the course of a day's drive and beginning and ending in the border city of Braganca, home to Portugal's last royal dynasty. The Spanish traveler notes the prevalence of ruined fortified castles all along the border, marveling that centuries of intermittent warfare could have separated "brothers and neighbors," especially in light of the fact that "these people are so affable." Even today he is a bit chagrined by the busloads of fellow Spaniards who descend on old fortress towns "disposed to buy everything with an air of superiority." Although they are greeted by smiling merchants, he notices that many signs welcome tourists in four languages, "though not in the traveler's own tongue" (i.e., Spanish).

The province is a diversified land subject to considerable variations of rainfall and altitude. From Braganca, the "cold land" where broom and thistle alone can thrive on the rock-strewn mountains, he gradually descends to the "hot land," the lush terraced hillsides of the Douro Valley, where grape arbors line both banks of the wide river that leads to the sea. En route he traverses villages known for elegant Belle Epoque spas and for native sons like Ferdinand Magellan and the writers Camilo Castelo Branco and Miguel Torga. To be sure, he is often reminded that fame is ephemeral by residents unimpressed by local celebrities from the past and sites of historic significance. In the shadow of a monument to the early-twentieth-century author Trindade Coelho, townspeople cheerfully aver, "No, I've never read anything by him," and two women chatting below a castle built by the Knights Templar are mystified by the traveler's queries: "Knights Templar . . . ? Don't know them, They must be from somewhere else."

At times "A Portuguese Voyage" is as much about "the traveler" and his reaction to his (and our) times as it is about Tras-os-Montes. And while his tone is marked by wry detachment and a lively sense of humor, he is obviously moved by the lot of a gentle people fated to live in a place that has always been, except for the Douro Valley, as harsh as they themselves are hospitable. His last two days follow "trails of emigration" back to the border over arid highlands where the summers, including the one he has chosen for his journey, are as torrid as the winters are long and frigid. He drives over uncertain roads through depopulated towns past abandoned stone quarries and failed factories and across railroad crossings that warn of trains which have not run for decades. The traveler wonders about a news report on his car radio that tells of a Lisbon soccer team's success in recruiting a Yugoslav player for a salary equal to "half of the combined value of all these villages," while observing that the only prosperous people are young emigrants visiting for the summer from new homes in France or Canada. One such visitor deplores his desolate hometown and rails against homesickness "as if his longing were a curse."

Llamazares sympathizes with the young who flee what a casual tourist may describe as idyllic scenes where peasants continue to thresh wheat, tend sheep, and draw water "as in the Bible," a way of life he is convinced "will soon disappear forever as soon as they die." But he is dramatically reminded that survival can be stubborn when he reaches Argozelo, a border town described in his guide book as a sanctuary centuries ago for Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and later within Portugal itself. When he asks townspeople about the historical Jewish presence, he meets with suspicion and denials until one man counters with "Are you a Jew?" And when the traveler responds that he is not, the man cautiously volunteers, "Well, I am, and so are many others in these parts from Braganca to Mirandela." The traveler, obviously perceived as a kindred marginal spirit, is followed to his car as the villager persists, "Are you sure you're not a Jew?" However, the trip has served to show the traveler that he is not like the clandestine Jews who only now feel free to speak, nor does he resemble any of the other wanderers he has encountered in Tras-os- Montes, including emigrants, Gypsies, and Angolan refugees. Unlike all such wanderers, "the traveler can, whenever he chooses, return home . . . even at this moment if he so wishes."

Richard A. Preto-Rodas

University of South Florida

Foreign Criticism

Cecilia Vicuna. The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna / QUIPOem. Catherine de Zegher, ed. Esther Allen, tr. Hanover, N.H. University Press of New England. 1998 ((c) 1997). xv + 95 pages, ill. / 140 pages, ill. ISBN 0-8195- 6324-2.

Cecilia Vicuna is one of Chile's most accomplished and groundbreaking poet- artists. During the sixties she was a founding member and "ideologue" of the Chilean avant-garde poetic movement "TribuNO" (Not a Tribe), which "said NO to the world in its present state and YES to life." During her political exile in Europe and Colombia in the seventies and eighties, and presently from New York, Cecilia Vicuna continues to be at the forefront of Spanish American poetry and art, exploring and creating new esthetics which, on one hand, propose original connections with Andean cultures and, on the other hand, question the status of the art object in relationship to the poet-artist and the reader-viewer, the relation between time and space.

The Precarious/QUIPOem is the first book-length publication in English of and about Vicuna's work. The book has been cleverly designed in that it is two books in one, with two different titles and front covers. One introduces the reader to her poems and photographic representations of her precarious objects, installations, weavings, and constructions in interior and exterior space in both urban and natural settings. The other opens to an interview and four critical essays on her artistic and poetic production. A bibliography of and about Vicuna's work and a complete listing of her exhibits in the middle of the book separate the two parts.

QUIPOem, deftly translated by Esther Allen, includes both an autobiographical text and a collection of poems in intertextual relationship with photographs of her art (1966-94). "Loose Stitches" for example, is printed on the photograph of Stupid Diary (1972), thus inserting the poem in space. Both language and image inform each other to produce a new artistic object, an expanded sphere of meanings. Constellation in Greenwich Street (1994) is another instance of the intimate connection Vicuna creates/finds between the linguistic and the visual. The accompanying subtext reads: "writing is the door to the underworld." QUIPOem, like most of Vicuna's work, successfully integrates European and Andean culture and art, and further explores her longstanding concern with connections between apparently very disparate cultures in the deep structures of language.

The first two essays, "Spinning the Common Thread" by Lucy R. Lippard and "Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots" by Catherine de Zegher, focus on Vicuna's visual art, while Hugo Mendez-Ramirez's "Cryptic Weaving" and Kenneth Sherwood's "Sound Written and Sound Breathing: Versions of Palpable Poetics" examine her poetic production. All four studies approach her work in the context of both artistic and cultural influences, and explore the manner in which Vicuna has carved new esthetic ground and proposed artistic and poetic creations which both shatter holistic and universalistic conceptions of the artistic object and connect cultural, linguistic, and semantic fields historically separated by political and economic interests. Her work searches for and establishes links between the native/Andean and European/mestizo cultures; it obliterates traditional divisions between the public and the private, the local and the global, thus proposing an alternative weltanschauung with profound political implications.

In "Spinning the Common Thread" Lippard focuses on the precarious objects created by Vicuna with both natural and human-made material detritus. They embody marginal existence, and in the recurrence of thread and textiles, they evoke the marginality of Spanish American native women. De Zegher's essay, on the other hand, as its title suggests, approaches Vicuna's weaving and installations and their connections with Andean cultures and anthropological and artistic perspectives. She also contextualizes Vicuna's work within contemporary artistic production, exploring the dialogue it establishes with Kurt Schwitters's work and the Brazilian neoconcrete group art povera. Weaving, for Vicuna, is an "alternative discourse and a dynamic mode of resistance." In her disruption of official, authoritative discourse, she creates unconventional modes of communication which question the legitimacy of existing power structures.

Mendez-Ramirez's essay explores Vicuna's conception of poetic language and her recurrent preoccupation with etymologies, which allows her to penetrate the surface of the world, to isolate semantic units, to establish new semantic fields, and to find connections among seemingly separate cultures. Sherwood's study centers on the oral and performative quality of her poetry. Vicuna reconfigures the division between oral and written language by means of "sound breathing" and "sound writing."

This important and beautiful book is a valuable contribution to the understanding and dissemination of Cecilia Vicuna's work. Anyone interested in contemporary Latin American poetry and art cannot ignore her production, and will find this book to be an invaluable reference.

Patricia Rubio

Skidmore College

Spanish Women Writers and the Essay: Gender, Politics, and the Self. Kathleen M. Glenn, Mercedes Mazquiaran de Rodriguez, eds. Columbia. University of Missouri Press. 1998. ix + 294 pages. ISBN 0-8262-1177-1.

The subject matter of Spanish Women Writers and the Essay is timely, and the collection is a groundbreaking one, since the essay in general has been studied so little and essays by women hardly at all. All the studies gathered here are worthy, thought-provoking, and well written. The organization is coherent and logical, and there is a good balance between literary considerations and themes addressed in the specific works discussed. The quotations have been translated into English, which will make the book accessible to non-Hispanists in women's studies, sociology, history, literature, and other fields. The documentation is well rounded and informative.

The introduction by Kathleen Glenn and Mercedes Mazquiaran is clear and concise, offering a good general orientation and giving the reader a framework and some historical background. In the first essay, Estelle Irizarry takes the modern Marshall McLuhan concept that "the medium is the message" and applies it retroactively to Concepcion Arenal's choice of this genre for her mission of advocacy. This is a particularly important study since Arenal is an elusive figure; she is often mentioned in asides or footnotes, but precisely because she wrote only essays, her work is not often studied in literature courses. She was a pioneer in the development of the essay, a genre that was definitely a masculine enclave in her day. Irizarry gives a good view of writers contemporary to Arenal, helping the reader contextualize her literary and political world. Arenal's style is analyzed in her use of metaphors, gender-specific language, and even word counts.

Maryellen Bieder's essay is brilliant, as she is able to synthesize coherently an immense and tremendously varied body of literature. Bieder captures Pardo Bazan's extraordinary intelligence as well as her fine sense of irony; she does not shy away at all from the contradictions that sometimes surface in Pardo Bazan's thinking. Michael Ugarte also analyzes paradoxes and contradictions, real or apparent, in the work of Carmen de Burgos, and Alda Blanco's study of Maria Martinez Sierra (Maria de la O Lejarraga) is a fine work.

Mary Lee Bretz uses a sociological point of view in her study of Margarita Nelken, dividing the essayistic functions into pedagogical and performative categories. Bretz's work is extremely well grounded in theory about the genre, and she studies the layers of the texts' voices at some length. Shirley Mangini's work on Rosa Chacel is much needed, for, like Pardo Bazan, Chacel is known mostly for her fiction and not for her essays, and they deserve study. Chacel's investigation of eroticism is fascinating, and Mangini takes a look at this aspect of Chacel's work as well as the contradictions in it.

Janet Perez's essay is another top-notch work: she begins her examination of Maria Zambrano by looking at her as a student/disciple of Ortega y Gasset, but shows how the student transcends the master. This assertion will shock the classicists, but Perez builds her ground carefully and gives it the proper and necessary philosophical background. She takes on those who claim that Zambrano's work is unsystematic and fragmentary by analyzing her system on its own terms, and at the same time appreciates the author's metaphors, particularly the dawn/birth/light images. Emilie Bergmann studies essays written by Carmen Martin Gaite during the 1980s; Martin Gaite is known as a novelist, and this study is the first on her nonfiction work. In her analysis, Bergmann separates Martin Gaite's academic voice from her personal one.

Nancy Vosburg takes on a fascinating and much-maligned woman, Lidia Falcon. While some consider Falcon the Simone de Beauvoir of Spain, for others she is pariah. Vosburg's essay is enlightening, especially as she shows the reader how form becomes forum, in much the same way as Irizarry did with Arenal. Vosburg is able to capture Falcon's biting and sarcastic humor, something that has escaped many commentators of this writer's work. Christina Duplaa's study of Montserrat Roig examines the complex relations of memory, memoir, testimony, and history, emphasizing Roig's political and personal commitment to give voice to the voiceless, memory to the forgotten. This essay is the only one in the collection that addresses the multiple marginality of those whose culture has no state; as a Catalan, Roig is on a different level of "otherness" than the rest.

The final two essays address two well-known women of the current intellectual world of Madrid. Mercedes Mazquiaran analyzes Soledad Puertolas's recent prizewinning book, La vida oculta, which the author claims is a search for direct communication with the reader as well as a reflection on the true meaning of writing. Puertolas sees fiction as an escape and essay as a finding, and strives for a dialogue with her reader, using the metaphor of weaving or sewing. Elena Gascon Vera studies the nonfiction work of Rosa Montero, probably best known within Spain for her contributions to El Pais. Gascon Vera explains Montero's cultural and political importance during the "transition," particularly revealing in her choice of interviewees, and focuses on Montero's content rather than her journalistic style.

It seems that an essay on Rosalia de Castro and Maria Aurelia Capmany would have greatly enhanced this collection. The editors obviously could not do everything, but the inclusion of these two, who represent some of Spain's marginalized areas, would have been particularly welcome.

Kathleen McNerney

West Virginia University

Translations

Ana Maria Moix. Dangerous Virtues. Margaret E. W. Jones, tr. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 1997. 153 pages. $10. ISBN 0-8032-3189-X (8237-0 paper).

It is a pleasure to see the addition of the five stories included in Ana Maria Moix's Dangerous Virtues to the growing list of Spanish fiction in translation available for scholars, students, and general readers. The selections vary widely in style and theme, starting with the ambiguous title story, which may narrate a frustrated lesbian relationship, or, as Moix herself pointed out, a tale of narcissism in which the "double" exists only in the protagonist's imagination. "Once upon a Time" plays ingeniously with the conventions of the fairy tale, although a reader without knowledge of some Catalan and Castilian tales, nursery rhymes, and songs will perforce miss some allusions. Both "The Naive Man" and "The Dead" treat characters who view life through the distorted mirrors of alcoholism and madness, while "The Problem" is a humorous look at the sexual difficulties of a combative married couple.

Were one to prepare a class on the difficulties of translation, it would be hard to find better texts than the fictions of Ana Maria Moix. Of deceptive simplicity in her Castilian, the problems immediately become apparent when one attempts to convey the multiple meanings of an individual word, phrase, or sentence in another tongue. Award-winning translator Margaret E. W. Jones (winner of the 1990 Kayden National Translation Award for Esther Tusquet's novel The Same Sea as Every Summer) has constructed a consistent system of decision- making in her translation, and one always respects her choices, while recognizing them as frequently involving Solomonic pain. That Jones understands these nuanced stories is clear from her intelligent afterword. One gleans from it the time and effort she must have spent attempting to preserve meaning on all levels. A couple of examples will serve to show the difficulty she confronted. Jones speaks knowledgeably about the allusions to Laclos in the title of the first story, and Joyce in the last, and she succeeds beautifully in maintaining the reference in her English texts. With stories like "El inocente," however, the feat is more difficult. Jones opts for the most important meaning that inocente has within the story, namely naivete, but necessarily sacrifices the other meaning (literal innocence from guilt) and thereby several allusions, most notably and directly to fellow Barcelonan Mario Lacruz and his 1953 landmark novel El inocente, but by extension also to Kafka and Gogol. In the same story, she renders a drunk taking a wrinkled bill from his pocket with "una mano ligera y tremula" as "a nimble, tremulous hand." My first reaction would be to read this as oxymoronic, and to think that "a slight, trembling hand" or "a thin, tremulous hand" would have come closer to accuracy, but then perhaps the thematic development of the story, involving deft self-delusion as it does, bears out Jones's choice.

The respective tolerance of English versus Spanish for sentence fragments or repetitions creates another problem in tales like "Once upon a Time," where characters repeatedly fall to the floor "golpeandose la cabeza." Jones renders golpear variously as "pummeled" and "beat," clearly looking to liven up the text with words with greater "punch" (pardon the pun) than the more neutral "hit," and to avoid redundancies. I give this as another example of Jones making a choice that one always respects as coherent within her translational system, even while recognizing that other systems would arguably have been possible. It is admirable that Jones always seeks to make the act of translation "invisible," calling attention to Moix's original and drawing it away from her own contribution.

In short, this is a text that can be read smoothly and well, with confidence in the translator's honor, by anyone interested in feminist narrative, contemporary Spanish fiction, or tales well told. It will be of special interest to scholars teaching classes on women writers in translation.

Patricia Hart

Purdue University

Soledad Puertolas. Bordeaux. Francisca Gonzalez-Arias, tr. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 1998. xii + 143 pages. $15. ISBN 0-8032-8748-8.

Bordeaux is the English translation of Soledad Puertolas's 1986 novel Burdeos. Several themes are at its core, each expressed in a separate section. "Pauline" revolves around the issue of judgment, "Entre-Deux-Mers" treats stagnation, and "The Capitals of the World" examines mobility. Character rather than plot predominates in this nonlinear narrative, with each section portraying the experiences of one of three individuals who belong to the same circle of acquaintances but never meet in the space of the novel.

In "Pauline" the eponymous protagonist does not judge but simply gazes while the moral histories of others-Helene Dufour, Rose Fouquet, Florence Clement, and several servants, Madeleine, Gracielle, and Claude-pass before her eyes. Marcel, Pauline's father, an avid reader of Montaigne, the philosopher for whom doubt was essential and judgment deadly, becomes an observer of human behavior yet fails to see beyond his own judging eyes. His daughter, to her credit, learns not to judge but sinks nevertheless into a bog of indifference. As if in a dream, Pauline watches as people she hardly knows pass through her field of vision. On one particular day, her purse holds a number of items vital to others: letters used for blackmail, a train ticket, and money to pay off the blackmailer. But Pauline, only the courier, never learns the outcome of the intrigue.

Rene Dufour, the son of Pauline's best friend Helene Dufour, is the weak-willed protagonist of "Entre-Deux-Mers." When Helene abandons her husband and young son to marry an American millionaire, Rene flounders for the next two decades, moving indifferently from one place to the next, one girlfriend to the next. He takes a serious interest in nothing and no one until he meets Bianca, a new mother-perhaps in the double sense of the phrase-who becomes his first sexual partner and for whom he steals a large sum of money from his father. Neither his own mother nor Bianca, however, is able to fill the void in Rene's life. Only when his father steps aside, leaving Rene to manage the family winery, does his life acquire direction.

The pace of the narrative picks up notably in "The Capitals of the World," as the author begins virtually to bombard the reader with thematic material. Every other sentence underscores the anonymity of human existence, the failure of individuals to penetrate the lives of others. The American-born Lillian Skalnick, Helene's stepdaughter, takes a whirlwind tour of Europe, skimming the surfaces of a number of French, Spanish, and Italian cities. She is an attractive, intelligent woman, and several men attempt to draw her into their lives. She always slips away but garners something from each encounter. "General truths lie at the bottom of all behavior," she maintains. And, indeed, Lillian rises to the occasion of life more successfully than does either Pauline or Rene.

What are the general truths taught by the characters of Bordeaux? Although the author does not provide a precise answer, perhaps she offers a hint with the novel's title: a city, symbolic of modern reality, stark and desolate like the Edward Hopper painting Rome by the Sea, which is featured on the book's cover. The reader must ultimately ask and answer the question: what is Bordeaux? A fine wine, like the one Pauline receives in payment for her services: "That dark red liquid, full of light, of shadows and tints, conferr[ing] a sense of security and risk . . . its flavor [like] nothing else"? Or is it a town? Or, more obliquely, an often-cited example of metonymy? The last of these is particularly instructive, since the lives recounted in Bordeaux function according to the principle of proximity rather than commonality, which seems, to me at least, to be the general truth contained in Bordeaux's "permanent bustle."

Bordeaux is an outstanding novel, and Francisca Gonzalez-Arias's translation does it justice. I recommend it to all fiction enthusiasts.

Kay Pritchett

University of Arkansas