Bombal, Maria-Luisa

New York. 1982. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Some Browning To Front Endpapers,Otherwise Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374221189. 112 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Sigrid Spaeth. keywords: Literature Translated Chile Latin America Women. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Maria Luisa Bombal was one of the most important Latin American writers of this century. It is ironic that while a younger generation of Hispanic writers has attained a well-merited celebrity in this country, the work of Bombal-which in many ways anticipates that of writers like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and JosE Donoso -has remained unknown to the English-speaking public. The stories in NEW ISLANDS, written in the 1940s, represent the best of Bombal's work, now at last available in the United States. Bombal blends the baroque sensibility that so characterizes the Latin American novel with an absolute precision of expression, Her stories are perfect little gems, models of the way an artist consciously crafts a work, Every word, every effect, however lush and extravagant, is evidence of an artist in perfect control of her material, Bombal is a virtuoso of language, but her stories are more than exercises in style, for they are concerned with the plight of women trapped-as women have so often been-in situations not of their own making. Bombal is no sentimentalist. The lives of her characters are all the more evocative and haunting, all the more universal, be- cause these women are flawed human beings, at times irrational, often accomplices in their own subjugation. These stories, richly distilling passion and fear, are the precursors of a modern feminist sensibility, a new kind of writing about women by women. inventory #12946 ISBN: 0374221189.