A Companion to Latin American Women Writers ed. by Brígida M. Pastor and Lloyd Hughes Davies (review)

Pastor’s and Davies’s volume is a collection of fourteen essays meant to serve as an introduction to fourteen Latin American women novelists and poets: Sor Juana, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Alejandra Pizarnik, Luisa Valenzuela, Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferré, Laura Esquivel and Laura Restrepo. As the title of the volume indicates, this collection provides a useful companion piece to readers unfamiliar with these authors. Although the essays do not contribute new perspectives on the authors or works discussed, the value of the collection resides in the essays’ accessibility to the non-specialist reader. Most of the essays combine pertinent biographical and cultural background on the authors and their circumstances while simultaneously providing useful entryways into several of these authors’ works.

Pastor and Davies note in their introduction that the volume is meant to guide the reader to an understanding of the socio-historical circumstances that gave rise and shape to the voices studied in the volume. Two other essays fulfill this promise particularly well. Philip Swanson’s essay on Isabel Allende does an admirable balancing act between convincingly explaining why Allende remains very much deserving of a place in an anthology of Latin American women writers and—simultaneously—why academics and critics have become increasingly disillusioned with, and even dismissive of, her novels. Swanson writes knowledgeably of Allende’s trajectory and offers a useful reminder of the ways in which her early fame was buoyed partly by fortunate family connections and partly by being able to ride on the cusp of several major historical and cultural transitions of the last half-century. He traces Allende’s literary development from her beginnings as an exiled writer riding on the coattails of the Boom novel to her established fame as a writer of romances with a political or ethical edge, to her mass media apotheosis when Oprah selected Hija de la fortuna (Daughter of Fortune) for her Book of the Month Club. Swanson’s conclusion, that Allende’s is indeed a “Literatura light,” yet one that continues to “affect[s] millions of readers within and without Latin America” (167), captures well the equanimity of his position.

Stephen Hart’s essay on Clarice Lispector eloquently and concisely places Lispector’s career within and against the major cultural and literary movements of her generation: the Latin American Boom and the emergence of second wave French feminist thought on embodied language. At the same time, the critic signals the importance of the emergence of Subaltern Studies as a useful tool for critics eager to deconstruct the social import of Lispector’s fiction. Reading or re-reading Lispector’s work against this literary-theoretical and philosophical triptych may not cast new light on her works, but it brings these works into a richly evocative focus. Hart’s essay leaves no doubt that Lispector is a writer’s writer, one whose voice and work are already enshrined in the pantheon of Latin American letters.

Although less concerned with explaining the intersection between the author’s work and the sociological or cultural forces that impacted this work, the essays by Nina Scott on Sor Juana, Brígida Pastor on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Teresa Hurley on Elena Poniatowska, Sharon Magnarelli on Luisa Valenzuela and Lloyd Hughes Davies on Laura Restrepo stand out not only for the overview of the authors’ creative trajectory but for their informed and sensitive understanding of the various stages in the writer’s trajectory. The otherwise fine essay by John McCulloch on Alejandra Pizarnik makes no mention of the poet’s likely ambiguous sexual orientation, nor does the critic make any mention of Pizarnik’s most sexually aberrant and most polemical work, La condesa sangrienta.

The editors’ introduction contains an overview of some of the important debates surrounding women’s writing in Latin America, and is presented...