2.0 out of 5 stars
I don't know why..., October 16, 2011
I had read stories by María Luisa Bombal in another book in the original Spanish -- La última niebla y la amortajada.
I bought and read this book for a Literature of the Western World class. "The Last Fog" is truly surrealistic and very good. No interpretation can be fully clear on the mental stability of the narrator, on whether she dreams or is awake, or on whether she experiences half of the things she writes about or not. Her perception of events is truly intriguing and emphasized by the otherworldly environment of forests, rivers, and the trip[s] to the foggy city. The narrator's central problem, I felt, was her suppression, figurative lack of air, and frustration in real life. Could she have been envying others' deaths....Is she not ready for that final step?
"New Islands" puzzled everyone. It is incomprehensible how it all ties together, at least in this English translation. A woman rejected marriage decades ago, perhaps because a wing grows on one of her shoulders, although it is a secret and hidden at all times. She experiences constant pain from sleeping on her other side for decades, but she does not age. At the suggestion of having bird-like qualities, she faints. How that would influence the appearance or the disappearance of islands when the men go out to the sea nearby... I can't imagine. Maybe it does tie in or have a significance worth reflecting on, but when the professor was not in the room we really couldn't say how or find much on which to reflect.
The stories in between--- for example "Braids," and the one about the bottom of the sea, constantly refer to French fairy tales and to the cultural environment of the landholding, Chilean upper classes from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. "Trees" was promising, but in the end it is frustrated by the incoherent switches between piano concerts, the dull marriage she ended in the past, and the tree by the window in her old house.
I don't know why, but I would venture to believe that selecting this work appealed to our instructor because she has interests in feminist theory, not in Latin American literature.
Moving on to another topic, I don't know which of Bombal's works Jorge Luis Borges thought so full of merit. His introduction was not written for this work, and I don't know when or for what work or publication it was written. It is about a page OR LESS, and it does not examine her work or provide insight into it. I don't think that the way to sell this book is to spotlight his introduction so shamelessly, since it is shorter than anyone would expect. Both of them are dead. Her work can stand on its own.
I am not a literary critic, or even the sharpest of readers, I can humbly admit, but I do not believe that this work as a whole is interesting. None of the other five people in this class thought much of New Islands, either. I am saddened to say that I did not like this collection, and I would not be willing to recommend it to an English-reading audience.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
TOO LITTLE TO TELL, January 5, 2004
In his tiny preface, Jorge Luis Borges describes Maria Luisa Bombal as a "wonderful Chilean writer", and in the introduction by the translators she is described as "the most important Latin American woman novelist of this century". This is not faint praise. The question is, how come nobody in America has ever heard of her and you can count her works in translation on two fingers? This slim volume is not enough for me to make any judgements of her worth or talent.
Bombal writes stories that border on fantasy or horror. In the first story, actually more a novella, "The Final Mist", she writes about two cousins who marry each other a few months after the man's first wife has died. He cannot forget his dead wife and she merely married him to keep from being a spinster. So she seeks her satisfaction in other places, meeting a strangely supernatural man in the streets one night. "The Tree" also concerns a marriage. In it, the wife, Brigada, comes to the realization that she no longer knows why she married her husband. "The Unknown" was to me the best story of the collection since it lacked all sentimentality. It was about a pirate ship that gets sucked down to the bottom of the ocean by a whirlpool. When the crew wakes up they find themselves in a desert whose sky is simply a reflection of the sand. "New Islands" shows the conflict between two men as they covet the same married woman even as strange volcanic islands form off the coast.
After reading this too brief collection, I want to read more by Bombal. There's just not enough here to get any feel for the writer. She does make you feel uneasy and when she gets the horror elements going it really works. Her relationships do verge into the sappy at times though. I also feel that this collection was manipulated in some way to try to portray Bombal as some feminist champion, as mentioned in the book jacket. I would like to find one of her novels, but I doubt I will find one in English.
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