Synopsis
This lyrical novel by one of Mexico's leading women writers explores both desire and the desire to tell a love story. In an idle moment between grading assignments, a French teacher sitting in a cafe in a Caribbean seaport town sketches an island on his white napkin. Like Proust's petite madeleine, the island opens up a host of images: "Island: the sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. Island: image of desire...All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on the maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago - the archipelago of desire." Monsieur N.'s original plan to use a Jules Verne novel about shipwrecked schoolboys as a translation exercise for his pupils becomes an obsession to collect every reference to islands he can find and to meditate on them in a diary of his imaginary travels - his Islandiary. Parallel to this quest is an archetypal love story that he begins writing in his notebook, printed in a narrow column with islands of quotations surrounding it. Voyaging and the quest for islands become a metaphor for the search for paradise, for the island as an imagined place where love achieves perfection. It also becomes a metaphor for writing: "Every text is an island."
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About the Authors
Julieta Campos was born in Havana, Cuba in 1932. After completing undergraduate studies at the University of Havana in 1952, she spent a year on scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris and received a certificate in contemporary French literature. She returned to Cuba and shortly thereafter emigrated to Mexico. In the next years she collaborated in magazines, including Octavio Paz's "Plural", editing the important literary journal "Revista de la Universidad de Mexico", and translated numerous works of fiction and nonfiction into Spanish. In 1978 she was elected president of the PEN Club of Mexico. Her novels include "Death by Water, A Redhead Named Sabina" (for which she won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1976), "Celina or the Cats", and "Fear of Losing Eurydice". Collections of criticism have been published as "The Mirror's Eye, The Novel's Function", and "The Persistent Legacy".
Leland H. Chambers is emeritus professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Denver.
Reviews
This Mexican novelist's allusive, experimental novel--her first published in the U.S.
ponders the meaning of love and desire.
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