Dream of Reason (European Women Writers) - Softcover

Chacel, Rosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803263643 ISBN 13: 9780803263642

Publisher: Bison Books, 2009

Synopsis

A masterpiece of modernist fiction about one man’s search for meaning, Dream of Reason (La sinrazón) reveals Rosa Chacel as an intellectual and literary innovator whose work stands alongside that of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf.

 

This meditative novel, grounded in the thinking of Spain’s great modern philosopher Ortega y Gasset, unfolds as the journal of a bourgeois chemist who makes his way in Buenos Aires just before and during the Spanish Civil War. Tracing his relationship with three women, Santiago Hernández explores the power of his own intentions and the limits of human reason. His introspective experiment, set against the background of world-altering events, documents the workings of a self-absorbed mind speculating on the inseparability of self and circumstance and is a brilliant enactment of how, from such tensions, narrative emerges.

About this title

About the Author

Rosa Chacel (1898–1994), one of the most promising pre-Civil War writers, was “rediscovered” in her native Spain after returning to Madrid from an exile of more than three decades. In addition to La sinrazón, her many works include Teresa, Memorias de Leticia Valle, and Barrio de Maravillas (The Maravillas District, Nebraska 1992).

 

Carol Maier also translated Chacel’s Memoirs of Leticia Valle (Nebraska 1994), for which she won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a translation of a literary work, and the Eugene Kayden Translation Competition’s Meritorious Achievement Award.

Reviews

Chacel's modernist novel, published in her native Spain in 1960, takes encyclopedic stock of the intimate life of ideas. Santiago Hernández, a bourgeois Argentine, writes a rambling confession that opens with first love—for the beautiful and self-destructive dancer Elfriede Pabst, whom he encounters in Europe and meets again much later to disastrous effect. Santiago returns to Buenos Aries just before the Spanish Civil War, inherits both a factory and a palatial estancia and blossoms from a man delirious with desire for things to being a man who is a master of things. But the bulk of the book (and of Santiago's life) is concerned with his marriage to the Cuban Quitina, whose evolution into mature sensuality is a triumph. Against a backdrop of world-shattering events, the impact of art and thought informs elegantly drawn conversations (including a sustained riff on Oedipus where Quitina rewrites the myth from a proto-feminist perspective). Chacel's masterpiece is a book where the death of a fly provides as much opportunity for self-knowledge as love's pure drift. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803263643
• ISBN 13: 9780803263642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 718