La tejedora de sombras by Jorge Volpi (review)

The concept of the tejedor/a (weaver) is an ancient one. In cultural mythology, the art of weaving has been associated with the relaying of information, of ancient tales or to prepare the listener for future battles or other unforeseen circumstances. The discussion of the weaver’s importance, from a narrative standpoint, is not fortuitous, for it allows the reader of La tejedora de sombras to consider not only its principal character as a weaver, but also her story—and the text itself—as something to be woven and, for all intents and purposes, to be constructed. Moreover, if we forego Barthes’s “death of the author” concept, we would be correct in asserting that the author of the novel, Jorge Volpi, is a master tejedor, a God-like narrative weaver whose designs for his characters and their fascinating worlds are gaining him recognition in literary circles in Mexico and abroad.

Volpi, founding member of the Mexican intellectual “Crack Movement”—a movement whose manifesto demands a complexity in its literature, a dislocation from Mexican time and space and a polyphony of narrative voices—has undoubtedly become one of Mexico’s most important writers, with recognition superseding the confines of his homeland as a result of English and German translations of his most renowned novels such as En busca de Klingsor (1999), El fin de la locura (2003), and No será la tierra (2006). Moreover, his essays have addressed a wide-range of difficult and complicated topics: El insomnio de Bolívar: cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI (2009), Leer la mente: el cerebro y el arte de la ficción (2011), and Días de ira: tres narraciones en tierra de nadie (2011) are three recent titles that evidence his various interests in identity, politics, and philosophy. His works, in addition to international translations, have merited literary awards, as the recent Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa that La tejedora de sombras was awarded.

A superficial analysis of the novel shows a musical and operatic organization of sorts: chapter 1 is “Allegro con brío,” chapter 2 is “Scherzo: Agitato,” the third is “Andante,” and the fourth, “Finale: Adagio.” The music references stop there, as the novel centers on Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan and their unlikely affair that transports them to Switzerland where they meet Carl Gustav Jung, who becomes a witness of their love affair. Volpi’s attempt to present the invariable relationship that would have developed among the three characters is not completely original, as Juan Luis Sánchez has already noted in his own review of La tejedora de sombras (see suite101.net). Sánchez is the first to note in Volpi’s work echoes to John Kerr’s novel A Most Dangerous Method (1993), Christopher Hampton’s drama The Talking Cure (2002) and David Cronemberg’s film A Dangerous Method (2011). A quick glance at the connection between these works confirms that Kerr’s novel influenced Hampton’s play, which was then adapted to the big screen by Cronenberg. Volpi too was influenced by other texts—letters, photographs, paintings, and biographies written on Murray and Morgan—and La tejedora de sombras is a perfect example of the sort of hybrid novels that seem to be “in” in contemporary literary circles. La tejedora de sombras becomes—by the weaving of photographs and tormented personal diaries written by Christiana Morgan—a pièce de résistance where a real life couple becomes fictional in a torrid love story that the reader can “weave,” as having taken place in the manner the novel lays out or not, by the fact that the text is fraught with the possible questions to the faithfulness of the events recounted by the principal characters.

The novel, from all that has been previously explained, does pose a challenging read and will require the careful attention of the reader to begin weaving the different recollections and parts of the story together and—just as important...