Novelists From Chile

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges..."

"I wish to inform the reader that even though this is a mystery, it is a mystery without murder. He will not find here any corpse, any detective; he will not even find a murder trial, for the simple reason that there will be no murderer. There will be no murderer and no murder, yet there will be....crime. And there will be fear. Those for whom fear has an attraction; those who are interested in the mysterious life people live in their dreams during sleep; those who believe that the dead are not really dead; those who are afraid of the fog and of their own hearts... they will perhaps enjoy going back to the early days of this century and entering into the strange house of mist that a young woman, very much like all other women, built for herself at the southern end of South America."

"The story I am about to tell is the story of my life. It begins where other stories usually end; I mean, it begins with a wedding, a really strange wedding, my own. (beginning of chapter one)"

"Here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. Costa Rica: Carmen Naranjo. Brazil: Clarice Lispector. Uruguay: Armonía Somers. Chile: María Luisa Bombal. Argentina: Silvina Ocampo, Nora Lange, Elvira Orphée..."

"As night was beginning to fall, slowly her eyes opened. Oh, a little, just a little. It was as if, hidden behind her long lashes, she was trying to see. And in the glow of the tall candles, those who were keeping watch leaned forward to observe the clarity and transparency in that narrow fringe of pupil death had failed to dim. With wonder and reverence, they leaned forward, unaware that she could see them. For she was seeing, she was feeling."

"I am privy to much that is unknown. Of sea and earth and sky I know an infinity of small and magic secrets. This time, however, I will tell only about the sea."

"Today, in Santiago, Chile, or Buenos Aires, in Caracas or Lima, when they name the best names, María Luisa Bombal is never missing from the list. This fact is even more notable when one considers the brevity of her work-which does not correspond to any determined "school" and which fortunately is devoid of any regionalism."

"Day by day, proud human beings that we are, we have a tendency to renounce our elemental roots, which accounts for the fact that women no longer appreciate their braids. Being rationalists nowadays, women in cutting off their braids ignore that in effect they are severing their ties with those magic currents which issue from the very heart of the earth. Because a woman's hair springs from the most profound and mysterious source, whence is born the first trembling seed of life-evolving therefrom to struggle and grow among many entangling forces, thrusting through the vegetal surface into the air and on upwards to the privileged forehead of its choice."

"Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories."

"She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh... (p430)"

"The Poet’s funeral had turned into the symbolic burial of freedom. (p441)"

"The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts. (p436)"

"I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women. (p487)"

"Because she lived under the big umbrella of my grandfather and she didn't have any education - she had three kids, had been abandoned by her husband, had no money - it was a horrible life. The only way she could get attention from her father or anybody else was by being sick. She didn't do it consciously. As a child I felt impotent and guilty because I felt that I couldn't help her in any way."

"It would have been much better if I had started [writing novels] at 19. But I couldn't. I had to support a family, I wasn't ready. And I think I needed to lose my country to start writing, because The House of the Spirits is an attempt to recreate the country I had lost, the family I had lost."

"The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other’s eyes. (p319)"

"...Captain Longfellow—who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people... (p31)"

""My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.” (p182)"

""Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.” (p367)"

"“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice” (p162)"

"He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one’s rights on earth. (p255)"

"Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. (p311)"

"Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me."

"He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious."

"Where does taste end and smell begin?"

"Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences."

"For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time."

"Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent."

"When Irina Bazili began working at Lark House in 2010, she was twenty-three years old but already had few illusions about life. (first line)"

""There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed..." (p103)"

"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. (p22)"

"“It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that” (p250)"

"Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend. All her neighbors came to her funeral, even the police and the blind man from the kiosk who almost never abandoned his business. Calle República was vacated and, as a sign of mourning, black ribbons hung from balconies and the red lights turned off in the houses. Every person has his or her story, and in this barrio they were almost always sad, stories of poverty and accumulated injustice, of every form of violence, of children dead before term and lovers who had run away, but María's story was different; it had a glow of elegance that gave wing to the imagination. (beginning of "Simple María")"

"That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities. (p125)"

"our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight. (p249)"

"I am Inés Suárez, a townswoman of the loyal city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile, writing in the year of Our Lord 1580. (first line)"

"How accommodating love is; it forgives everything. (p10)"

""They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail...Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us." (p264)"

"Alexander Cold awakened at dawn, startled by a nightmare. (first line)"

""With age, you acquire a certain humility...The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn't matter much if you look ridiculous" (p50)"

"According 2025"

"Jealousy. The person who hasn't felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. (p368)"

"love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. A thousand dangers threaten love, but if the couple defends it, it can be saved; it can grow like a tree and give shade and fruit, but that happens only when both partners participate. (p369)"

"Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives. (p433)"

"Most of my writing is an attempt to bring an illusory order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for my own identity. I have been doing it for several years, and I have achieved none of the above. My life is as messy as it always has been; my memory still works in mysterious ways-plus I am losing it!-and I still don't have a clear idea of who I really am. Most people would come to the same conclusion. We evolve, change, age. Nobody is carved in stone, except the very pompous or self-righteous."

"When I wrote my first novel, The House of the Spirits, I had no idea that literature was studied in universities and that people who had never written a book determined the value of others' writing. I simply thought that if a story had the power to touch a few readers, if it planted the seed of new ideas in them, if it seemed true and made a difference in somebody's life, it was valuable. Like most normal human beings, I had never read a book review. Word of mouth was how I chose the books I read."

"I never expected that the weird craft of writing would be of any interest to the general public, nor that a writer could become a sort of celebrity and be expected to behave like one. Writing is a very private matter that happens in silence and solitude-an introverted temperament is an asset in this job. Writing takes up an incredible amount of energy and time; there is very little left for anything else. But more and more the publishing industry forces the authors to become public figures and go around talking, reading, signing, and even selling their books. How can one be in the limelight and still write? Books deserve compassion. They are delicate creatures born to be accepted or rejected as a whole; they can't endure dissection under the microscope of the pathologist. Most writers are as vulnerable as their work. If you pin them against the wall and force them to explain the unexplainable, you might break them. I am afraid it's happening to me."

"Why do I write? This is a question that I often ask myself, although it is like trying to explain why I breathe. Writing is a matter of survival: if I don't write I forget, and if I forget it is as if I had not lived. That is one of the main reasons for my writing: to prevent the erosion of time, so that memories will not be blown by the wind. I write to record events and name each thing. I write for those who want to share the obligation of building a world in which love for our fellowmen and love for this beautiful but vulnerable planet will prevail. I write for those who are not pessimists and believe in their own strength, for those who have the certainty that their struggle for life will defeat all bad omens and preserve hope on earth. But maybe this is too ambitious... When I was younger, I thought I wrote only for the sake of those I cared for: the poor, the repressed, the abused, for the growing majority of the afflicted and the distressed of this earth, for those who don't have a voice or those who have been silenced. But now I am more modest. I think of my writing as a humble offering that I put out there with an open heart and a sense of wonder. With some luck, maybe someone will accept the offering and give me a few hours of his or her time so that we can share a story. And that story doesn't have to always be about the most solemn and transcendent human experiences. I find myself often writing for the same reason I read: just for the fun of it! Storytelling is an organic experience, like motherhood or love with the perfect lover; it is a passion that determines my existence. I am a story junkie. I want to know what happened and to whom, why and where it happened. Writing has been very healing for me because it allows me to exorcise some of my demons and transform most of my pain and losses into strength. Certainly I write because I love it, because if I didn't my soul would dry up and die."

"You think in words, for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of a photograph. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colors of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth. It is a prophetic moment; it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me. I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside. (from Prologue)"

"Write what should not be forgotten."