Clara: Thirteen Stories and a Novel (review)

Success has many names, and one of them is failure. The last novel I read by Luisa Valenzuela, a household name on the shelf of female writers from the Southern Hemisphere in the 1980s, was Bedside Manners. An exercise in “domestic” literature, originally published in 1990, about a señora who from her hotel room believes that she is witnessing the shaping of a coup d’état, it was so evanescent and inconsequential that I cannot but think it contributed to Valenzuela’s eclipse. The word eclipse connotes some sort of resurrection. In the last decade Valenzuela’s fans in the English-language world have awaited a comeback, especially those who appreciated her 1983 masterpiece, The Lizard’s Tail, about José López Rega, self-proclaimed astrologer, controversial minister of social welfare under General Juan Domingo Perón, and personal secretary to Isabel Perón, his second wife. But no comeback has materialized. In 1998 the London publisher Serpent’s Tail made available a collection of Valenzuela’s stories, but this book failed to restore her to the landscape of global literature, perhaps because it was recycled stuff, what in Spanish is known as un refrito. Puzzlingly, the recycling strategy has been used again in Clara: Thirteen Stories and a Novel, a retranslation of a Valenzuela work first published in English in 1976.

But the news isn’t altogether bad, for Clara is a haunting, memorable narrative that rivals the best novellas from Argentina. Its protagonist is a young, innocent Argentinean woman, a street worker—she resists the term “whore” [puta]—whose misadventures in Buenos Aires and on a depressing odyssey to the pampas with a circus make for a rousing read. Almost three decades after its first appearance, it has lost none of its strength; it begs to be read anew.

Valenzuela distills in the story a sensibility much in fashion in, for example, the slow-moving, meditative Polish and Czech cinemas of Andrzej Wajda and Milos Forman, a sensibility obsessed with the emotional life of fragile, vulnerable social types and greatly at odds with our fast-paced, socially ungenerous times. A dose of melancholy is injected into almost every other page. Clara—the name means “purity” or “clarity”—has no background to speak of. We first encounter her alone and fed up, waiting for a man to come, one of the many she meets as her journey progresses before our eyes. She is in her late teens, emotionally still a child. Where are her parents? What has pushed her to lead so miserable a life? Her portrayal reminds me of Flaubert’s “Simple Heart,” a masterful study of sanctity and stupidity. Clara is no saint, but it is debatable that she is stupid. I prefer to see her as an intelligent girl without the right resources (psychological or economic) to stop selling herself. Seeking leisure and security, she wanders from one hotel room to another, from a man’s bed to a park bench and so on. She has courage but refuses to use it to release herself from pain.

Clara’s very indecisiveness—she understands what freedom is about yet doesn’t embrace it—makes her a fascinating character, difficult to pin down. Society, especially one like Argentina’s, where machismo is the rule, is guilty of seducing Clara, of making her impure and turning her into sheer merchandise. But she is also to blame: like Peter Pan, she declines to grow up, to reroute herself, to say “enough.” Clara “thought that this business of turning nineteen already was painful,” Valenzuela writes. “Nineteen was an adult age and she ought to start thinking about responsibility.” But “even though she had seen the date, May 22, clearly stamped in the almanac in the [hotel] entryway, she promised herself she’d never reach nineteen.” And she doesn’t grow up until—well, until it’s far too late.

The best part of this recycling is Andrea G. Labinger’s translation. In...