B. 1938 in
Buenos Aries. Argentine novelist. Daughter of the novelist
Luisa Mercedes Levinson. Self-exiled to
France in the 1950s and 1960s. Settled in
New York City in 1979, before returning to Argentina a decade later. Along with
Jorge Luis Borges and
Julio Cortazar, one of Argentina's more famous literati. Along with
Clarice Lispector one of the most fantastic women writers in Latin America. If Borges is thought to be an author of intellectual novels, he is equalled, if not surpassed, by the semiotic disasters that Valenzuela's texts wreak upon our sheltered conceptions of political realities, language, and textual interference. Valenzuela currently lectures at a number of universities in
Europe and the
United States.
Valenzuela's work, typical of
literature in exile is a chaotic swarm of poetic prose, sweeping over hundreds of miles in single lines, spanning millenia in paragraphs. Her texts are
political, beautiful,
intellectual and filled with urgency. Like many other
Latin American writers, Valenzuela's work might be thought of as
magical realism, but this is only a fair tag if it is remembered that the realities of the political atrocities, which writers like Valenzuela and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez seek to address, are painful forces concentrated in unfair regimes that seek constantly to
censor and
oppress avante-gardism in the arts and
rebellion in literature. The political inequities of Argentina are a constant subject in Valenzuela's works.
Her
The Lizard's Tail is a chronicle of the mystical '
Sorcerer' who presided over the dead body of Argentina's
spiritual mother,
Eva Peron. The text moves easily between a real world and an entirely fantastic one. The scene switches quickly: the sorceror's diary, dialogues between anonymous government officials, and even Valenzuela's own difficulties with and fears of the text she is authoring, or channeling. The text is semiotically-charged, and the metaphors wrap around the political problems of her country with a comfort that the censors cannot always reject.
Here are the
Spanish titles of some of Valenzuela's principle works. Information on her is not easy to obtain, so I am not currently able to provide a complete
bibliography:
- Hay que sonreír (1966)
- Los heréticos (1967)
- El gato eficaz (1972)
- Aquí pasan cosas raras (1976)
- Como en la guerra (1977)
- Libro que no muerde (1980)
- Cambio de armas (1982)
- De noche soy tu caballo
- Donde viven las águilas (1983)
- Cola de lagartija (1983)
- One siren or another/ Unas y otras sirenas (1988)
- Realidad nacional desde la cama (1990)
- Novela negra con argentinos (1991)
- Simetrías (1993)
Some of her works in English-language
translation are: