Bittersweet Memories with La Bombal

I have to recognize I am not a fan of the books, actually in my school period, reading was not an activity in my list of “things I enjoy” so always when my language teacher gave to the class the monthly reading I used to drop in a little depression! But before people start thinking I am a bad student, I must say that I am not the kind of student that does not understand anything while reading, actually I classified my condition a few years ago as a “lazy reader” which is a person who understand in a good way what he reads but who takes a while to end a book. Anyway, if I have to talk about a favorite book, I think many titles comes to my mind, but today I would like to talk about Chilean literature, specifically about María Luisa Bombal, and her book “La Amortajada”. This book is not hard to read, actually is a teenage/adult reading very easy to digest, with a simple structure but with many details in the reading, something characteristic of this author, and is about Ana María, a death woman who makes a self-examination about the people who come to visit her in her coffin. She is a very romantic woman who lived in the disappointment and in the unwanted love, always with a big sadness in her heart and trying to understand why the love she wants is not the love that wants her, and all the memories she has in her coffin are surrounded by her own sadness. What really catches my attention of this book is the very close relation that the novel has with the life of the author and actually many of the facts in the reading are inspired in the real facts of the author life, so we can say the self-examination that the main character does in the book is actually a self-examination of María Luisa Bombal. She lived her best years in the 1940 decade, a very male chauvinist age in Chile, and she was involved in many tragic situations like trying to kill her own first husband, or being married with a homosexual painter who never loved her and who inclusive has parallel relationships with men while they lived together. I think I can relate this book with the world current situation, and the gender inequality that many people is fighting for make it disappear, and I also think is very sad to think that a novel that tell the life of a woman who lived in Chile like 70 years ago and who passed through several bad situations because the male chauvinism, is something that still happen in our days, and that is something worriant.

fragment

"María Luisa in the stancy" watercolor of Jorge Larco

(her gay husband) 1930