Abstract

Autumn of the Matriarch?

The article focuses on the book Bedside Manners, by Luisa Valenzuela. Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once rather pompously referred to Luisa Valenzuela as the heiress of Latin American fiction who wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked. That was in the early eighties, when her dislike of dogmas and certainties, her explorations of the uses of ambiguity, her forays into that reflective field where reality appears at its most real were the constant subjects of features, book reviews and heavy literary commentary, a time when she could reign unchallenged as the best-known and most-translated contemporary woman writer of the Southern Hemisphere. Valenzuela's youthful bravura has mellowed. Her sharp revolutionary edge seems not tepid but mismatched to current realities, and the role of articulating Argentina's passage to democracy has evaded her. As exemplified by Bedside Manners, her latest and probably most evanescent novel to appear in English, nostalgia and depression, permanent features of the Argentine psyche, have become somewhat pervasive in her development.