Luisa Valenzuela

Luisa Valenzuela in Quito, Ecuador, 1990.

Luisa Valenzuela (born November 26, 1938 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective.[1] She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina. Works such as Como en la guerra (1977), Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983) combine a powerful critique of dictatorship with an examination of patriarchal forms of social organization and the power structures which inhere in human sexuality and gender relationships.[2][3]

Biography

Luisa Valenzuela was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 26, 1938, to Pablo Franciso Valenzuela, a physician, and to writer Luisa Mercedes Levinson. At her mother's house various writers gathered such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato. Though she felt an interest in natural sciences from an early age, at 17 she began publishing in several newspapers, such as Atlántida, El Hogar and Esto Es, and worked for Radio Belgrano, as well. At 20, just barely married to Theodore Marjak, a French merchant marine, she moved to Paris where she worked for Radio Télévision Française, and met members of both the nouveau roman literary movement and Tel Quel. She published her first fiction work entitled Clara (Hay que sonreír), whose main character would give its name to the title of the book of both English and French translations. In 1958, Luisa Valenzuela gave birth to her daughter Anna-Luisa. In 1961 she moved back to Argentina, where she worked as a journalist for La Nación and Crisis magazine. In 1965 she got divorced. During 1967 and 1968 she traveled throughout Bolivia, Peru and Brazil working for La Nación.

In 1969 she obtained the Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Iowa where she wrote The Efficient Cat (El gato eficaz). Between 1972 and 1974 she lived in Mexico City, Paris and Barcelona, with a brief stay in New York, where she researched the expression of the marginal United States literature as a recipient of the scholarship awarded by Argentina's National Fund for the Arts (Fondo Nacional de las Artes). As a consequence of the National Reorganization Process, that partially censored her novel He Who Searches (Como en la guerra) by removing a torture scene, she moved to the United States where she lived for ten years. There she published in 1982 her short fiction book Change of Guard (Cambio de armas) and in 1983 The Lizard's Tail (Cola de lagartija), a novel about José López Rega, Minister of Social Welfare during María Estela Martínez's presidency that was supposed to be originally titled as Red Ant Sorcerer, Lord of Tacurú and Her Sister Estrella (El Brujo Hormiga Roja, Señor del Tacurú y su Hermana Estrella).[4][5]

Luisa Valenzuela was a Resident Writer at the Center for Interamerican Relations at New York and Columbia University, where she taught writing workshops and seminars for ten years. She was a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, at the Fund for Free Expression and member of the Freedom to Write Committee of the PEN American Center. In 1983 she was awarded the Guggenheim Scholarship. In 1989 she returned to Buenos Aires, where she finished her fiction works National Reality from Bed (Realidad nacional desde la cama), conceived initially as a play but finished as a novel and Black novel with Argentines (Novela negra con argentinos) that originally was meant to bear the title of The Motive (El motivo).

Awards

Works

Novels

Spanish

English

Short Stories

Spanish

English

Essays

Spanish

Notes

  1. ↑ Sharon Magnarelli, Reflections/Refractions, Reading Luisa Valenzuela (New York/Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988).
  2. ↑ Juana María Cordones-Cook, Poética de la transgresión en la novelística de Luisa Valenzuela (New York/Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991).
  3. ↑ Elia Geoffrey Kantaris, The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women's Narrative from Argentina and Uruguay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
  4. ↑ Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo (December 1983). "Paranoia del poder demoníaco en una gran novela" (in Spanish). Buenos Aires: Nueva Presencia. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  5. ↑ Rabassa, Gregory (2005). If this be treason; translation and its discontents. New Directions Publishing. p. 139. ISBN 0-8112-1619-5.

Bibliography and sources

External links

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