Las desterradas del paraiso, protagonistas en la narrativa de María Luisa Bombal, and: The New Islands and Other Stories (review)

reviews 117 bracing glance, freezing aesthetically Maggie's new-found isolating knowledge and connecting it to us with lyrical "insight." Some readers may question, as I do, this final static vision, but the problem is more one of false modulation of intensity rather than loss of either guts or control. In other minorkey passages, even in Union Street, Pat Barker pauses in ways very similar to this environmental coda—she frees herself for the moment from the daily traffic of misery to take stock of the pain in brief crescendos of compassion. But in both novels, it remains the particulars of the struggle that are the most sharply, honestly driven. The power of Pat Barker lies not in the abstracted sentiment of grief—what another poet of other trenches, Wilfred Owen, called the "eternal reciprocity of tears"—but in the day-to-day, page-by-page telling of these daring, vital tales. PETER COPEK Notes 'TAe Road to Wigan Pier (1937; rpt. New York: Berkley, 1967), pp. 112ff. 2Ibid., p. 25. Las desterradas delparaíso, protagonistas en la narrativa de María Luisa Bombai by Majorie Agosin. Montclair, N.J.: Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1983. 126 pp. The New Islands and Other Stories by Mana Luisa Bombai. Trans. Richard and Lucia Cunningham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. 112 pp. $12.95 (hardcover). In the sphere of Latin American letters, Maria Luisa Bombai (1910-1980) has had a bizarre career, though it's less bizarre when viewed in the narrower context of Latin American women writers. During the thirties when Naturalism was still (or belatedly) the dominant literary tendency, espeically in her native Chile, Bombai was venturing into the realm of the "fantastic." "The Final Mist" (more musical in its original title: "La última niebla"), the novella that heads the recently issued volume in English translations, was first published in 1935 in Buenos Aires, five years before Jorge Luis Borges began publishing (in Victorian Ocampo's journal Sur) his fictions to be collected in 7"Ae Garden of the Forking Paths (1941) and finally in Ficciones (1944). "Mist" was re-edited in 1941 in Chile in a volume which included. "The New Islands" as well as "The Tree," prefaced by the distinguised critic Amado Alonso. The other two stories comprising The New Islands and Other Stories, "The Unknown" and "Braids," originally appeared in Latin American magazines in the early forties. In 1938, Bombai published a short lyrical novel, The Shrouded Woman, narrated from the point of view of a dead woman—shades of Wilder's Our Town or Lucian 's Dialogues of the Dead perhaps, but certainly written years before the Mexican Juan Rulfo's brilliant narrative of dead voices, Pedro Parama. The Shrouded Woman was praised by Borges in a review (Sur, 1938), but after 1941, publication of Bombal's work ceased, with the exception of a few prose poems in magazines and "The Story of Maria Griselda" (1946), a fairy-tale sequel to The Shrouded Woman. Also, after her early, longer, more realistic works ("Mist," 7"Ae Shrouded Woman and "The Tree"), Bombal's writing, as in "The Unknown," precipitated toward the fairy tale (elements of which also appeared in "The New Islands^, or petered out in brief prose poems such as "Sea, Sky, Earth." After 1946, she became invisible in Latin America until 1977, when "Maria Griselda" was reissued in Chile. In 1940, she married and moved to New York City, and would not return to her native country until 1976. 118 the minnesota review What is extremely curious is that after she had been enthusiastically supported by wellknown critics and friends like the poet Pablo Neruda, Borges and Alonso, there was a thick silence around her work until the sixties when articles and dissertations began to appear. In recent years a few booklength studies have been published in Spanish, among them Las desterradas delparaíso, protagonistas en la narativa de Maria Luisa Bombai (Exiles from Paradise: Women Protagonists in the Works of María Luisa Bombai) by Majorie Agosin. Although it is no longer the fashion in contemporary criticism to write about the Hero (Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces being one of...