Women and Power in Argentine Literature: Stories, Interviews, and Critical Essays

12. Ana Mar

Ana María Shua, or Ani, as she is known to her friends, exudes the aura of a woman who is not afraid of her sensuality or of her maternal inclination. She has deeply set dark eyes that convey her pragmatic nature. Her smile is broad and engaging, her voice slow and rhythmical. When surrounded by her daughters, she is playful. When immersed in her thoughts she becomes somber, yet her dark side is curbed by her sense of humor and love of life. Ana María Shua THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Ana María Shua | The Author and Her Work Born in 1951 in Buenos Aires, Ana María Shua is a daughter of the Argentine bourgeoisie. Her mother was a dentist at the time of Shua’s birth and later became a psychologist. Her father held a degree in agronomy, but his main occupation was owner of a company that manufactured high-tension wires. Her parents were children of immigrants: on her mother’s side, Shua’s heritage is Polish Jewish; on her father’s side, the family was Jewish of Moroccan and Lebanese origin. Shua claims she was always a writer. She recalls writing poetry at the age of seven and having a lengthy collection of poetry by age ten. In school she was asked to write poems for national holiday celebrations and for special events and was known as the school poet. At age thirteen she declared she wanted to pursue a career in theater, but her mother, who felt that the life of the theater was not dignified enough for her daughter, hired a special tutor to help her develop her love of writing. As a young child, reading was also her passion. She says that initially she fell in love with the characters, later with the writers, but soon she came to realize that what she loved the most were the words themselves, that she had chosen “a world where all things, mountains, skies, pumas, pain, pleasure, trees, or friends, were made of words” (see interview below). Shua went to public high school at the highly regarded Escuela Nacional de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires National School) and later received the degree of Profesora de Letras (Professor of Literature) from the University of Buenos Aires, though, like so many other writers, she never taught. Instead, she continued to read and write voraciously and began to work in publicity, writing advertisements for marketing companies. She also developed a successful career as a freelance journalist and has written opinion pieces for most newspapers in Argentina as well as many magazines. Some of these opinion pieces were the source of what later became a book of significant commercial success : El marido argentino promedio (The Average Argentine Husband), modeled not necessarily after her own husband, a photographer and father of their three daughters, but rather after the humorous traits she finds to be common denominators of the average Argentine male. Shua’s writing career has been very diverse and productive. She has authored novels, short stories, micro-stories, poetry, screenplays, children’s books, books of humor, and erotic writing. She has focused both on the quality of her literature and on reaching a large and diverse audience. Therefore, she has tarana maría shua 279 geted some of her writing to popular audiences, while other works are more specifically aimed at the literary audience. Her influences have been as diverse as her readings, and Shua claims that she doesn’t truly have a hierarchy of favorite authors. However, she frequently mentions Franz Kafka, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges. She believes that “reading is a profoundly antisocial act; a private and secret revelation of love, desire and death” (see interview below ), and that literature reminds us both of our mortality and of our illusion of eternity. Shua’s first book was a book of poetry, El sol y yo (The Sun and I, 1967), which received a prize from the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Society of Writers) and from Fondo Nacional de Artes (National Foundation for the Arts). Her first novel, Soy paciente (Patient), was published in 1980. It received the first prize in the Losada International Literature Competition and was made into a movie directed by Rodolfo Corral in 1986. This novel was published again by Editorial Sudamericana in 1996 and is included in Atalaya ’s volume of Maestros...