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House of Mist stands as one of the first South American...)
House of Mist stands as one of the first South American novels written in the style that was later called magical realism. Of this story of a young bride struggling with her marriage to an aloof landowner?and the mysteries surrounding their life together?in a house deep in the lush Chilean woods, Penelope Mesic wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Bombal showed "bold disregard for simple realism in favor of a heightened reality in which the external world reflects the internal truth of the characters' feeling . . . mingling . . . fantasy, memory and event."
"One of the most outstanding representations of the avant-garde in Latin America." -Women Writers of Spanish America
("It is with particular interest... that we greet the publ...)
"It is with particular interest... that we greet the publication of New Islands, a slim book of evocative, haunting stories by Maria Luisa Bombal, a Chilean writer whose creative period was basically confined to the 1930's and 40's and whose work, although small in volume, was rich in its effects, anticipating the magic realism found in so much of today's Latin American fiction." - The New York Times
Maria Luisa Bombal was a Chilean novelist and story writer, one of the first to break away from the realistic tradition in Latin America.
Background
Maria Luisa Bombal was born in Vina del Mar, Chile, on June 8, 1910; the daughter of Martin Bombal Videla and Blanca Anthes Precht. Her father was an Argentine of French origin and her mother was of German extraction. In 1923, on the death of her father, María Luisa journeyed to Paris with her mother and two sisters, and there spent her adolescent years. She came to adopt French as her own tongue and wrote her first literary pieces in that language. Perhaps this explains in part why her style is so clear, in the French manner, stripped of superfluous material, unlike the traditional Spanish prose style heavy with rhetoric.
Education
Bombal graduated from the University of the Sorbonne in Paris with a thesis on the 19th century French writer Mérimée. She also studied dramatic art and participated in several theatrical groups, both in France and in Chile.
Career
In 1931 Bombal returned to her native Chile, but soon left in 1933 to live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she became a member of the thriving literary group which included Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo, publisher of the famous magazine Sur. Bombal worked for this journal, which published her two novels and short stories.
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and later Nobel Prize winner, was at the time consul of Chile in the Argentine capital, and under his inspiration Bombal composed her first novel, The Final Mist (La última niebla), which came out with critical acclaim in 1935. In 1938 her second novel, The Shrouded Woman (La amortajada) appeared.
In 1939 Bombal took a brief trip to the United States where she met such important writers as William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson. Back in Buenos Aires she published her stories "The Tree" ("El árbol") and "The New Islands" (Las islas nuevas"). After a short sojourn in Chile in 1941, she went again to the United States.
During a long span of 30 years Bombal lived in New York where the only works she published were reworkings of her two novels in English versions written by herself, The House of Mist (1947) and The Shrouded Woman (1948). She added so much additional explanatory material to the original of The House of Mist that it almost became a different book, unfortunately losing much of its power and fascination.
Finally, in ill health, Bombal returned to spend her last few years in Chile, where she died in Santiago on May 6, 1980.
Achievements
Bombal was one of the first Spanish American novelists to break away from the realist tradition in fiction and to write in a highly individual and personal style, stressing irrational and subconscious themes. In this respect she may be regarded as a precursor of the later Boom writers of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America. Her surreal narrative style influenced many later proponents of magic realism.
