A 17-year-old girl spends her days by her window, watching the house opposite in an affluent part of Buenos Aires. She is transfixed by a room where three women sit, the “pale clover” of their faces barely perceptible in the dim light. The unnamed narrator compiles a list of things they could be, or be made to be, in her imagination: spinsters, criminals, “wayward women”, “three governesses, with little joy in their lives” or “simply … three women who liked to pass the time in their drawing room”.
One day she intercepts an unsigned telegram addressed to the objects of her obsession. How does she guess the sender is a man? Why does she hate him straight away? As she spies on his visit to the room, her feelings – resulting, perhaps, from the fear of the unknown, of intimacy – strengthen: “Even though I knew I would hate him, I hated him even more when I saw him lean gently towards them.” Then a shared moment of beauty changes it all, “and it seemed as long as I was still young, nothing so complete or perfect could ever happen again”.
Born in 1905 in Buenos Aires, Norah Lange entered the Argentinian literary scene early, first as a poet; later, her novels and a childhood memoir became part of the Spanish-language canon. As César Aira says in his introduction to this first English translation of her work, she once told an interviewer that People in the Room had been inspired by the portrait of the three Brontë sisters painted by their brother, his own image erased from the canvas. Combining painterly qualities with poetic imagery, Lange’s prose is rich in metaphor, self-absorbed and, at its best, darkly irresistible.
read more here @ The Guardian and @ The Irish Times
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