The Chilean writer Maria Luisa Bombal (1910-1980) is little-known in the U.S.  Her novellas and short stories, published by small presses, are not disseminated on a large scale at chain bookstores or independent bookstores.  Certainly I had never heard of her until I came across New Islands and Other Stories.

Bombal had a cosmoolitan education. Educated in France as a girl, she later studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne.  She began to write fiction in 1934 while living with Neruda and his wife in Buenos Aires. She lived in the U.S. for 30 years.

I have read many male Latin American magic realists, but very few South American women writers.  With the exception of Isabel Allende and Clarice Lispector, they are difficult to find. Bombal’s fiction is revelatory, fascinating, and poetic, but impossible to classify: it is magic realism, it is poetry, it is surreal.   

Bombal’s rich, sinuous prose is enchanting.  She entices us into Gothic romances and fantasies. While reading her famous first novella,The Final Mist (1934), one falls spellbound into the moods of the Gothic heroine.  .

The narrator is bored and unhappy.  Her husband, Daniel, a grieving widower, married her shortly after his first wife died.  He still pines for his first wife, and does not try to conceal it.  He makes cryptic, cruel remarks. “Why did we get married?” and “Would you have rather been a wrinkled old spinster who does knitting for the poor people of the hacienda?”  The days pass very slowly.  One night, while Daniel sleeps, she wanders through the streets of the city and meets a man. 

She sets the Gothic mood.

Transformed into vapor by the fog, the white light of a street light bathes my hands in the pale beam, turning them ashen, spreading my vague silhouette on the grass.  And it is then, suddenly, that I see a shadow next to mine.

Every carefully-sculpted word describes the narrator’s mood and tragic emotional climate:   “fog,” “pale beam” “vague silhouette,” “shadow.”  It is cinematic, black and white. The shadow belongs to an attractive young man, whom she flings her arms around with abandonment.  In a mythic sequence, he leads her through an abandoned garden into a house that is in total darkness.  She is sexually satisfied for the first time. In the morning, she leaves her lover sleeping, and goes home to slip into her husband’s bed.  She believes the memory of this adventure will be enough for the rest of her life. 

But it is not, of course.  Was it a dream?  Does her lover exist? She longs to find him, and once thinks she sees him passing her in a carriage.  On a trip to the city, she searches for him and his house.

Her other stories are even more chimerical.  In “The Unknown,” the wreck of a pirate ship sends it “spinning to the bottom” of the sea.  The pirate captain and his men awake and have no idea where they are.  There are no stars, sun, or moon, and they sink ankle-deep in the sand.  Where are they?  The captain is terrified. 

I especially love the mysterious title story, “New Islands.” Like “The Unknown,” it centers on the water, but on lakes, not the sea.  Two siblings, Yolanda and Federico, live together in a house on the pampas, near the lakes, where four islands inexplicably emerge from the water. A party of hunters comes to visit, mainly because they want to see the islands.  The men decide to explore, but the island stinks and is covered with slimy weeds. And they keep hearing strange music. it must be Yolanda playing the piano, Federico decides. Then they are attacked by seagulls and must retreat.  (It is like a scene out of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds.) 

The sea gulls cluster around them in ever-tightening spirals.  Low, running clouds skim by overhead, weaving a vertiginous pattern of shadows.  The fumes rising from the earth grow more dense by the moment.  Everything boils, shakes violently, trembles.  The hunters cannot see; can hardly breathe.  Disheartened and afraid, they flee to their boats, return in silence to the mainland.

We know little about Yolanda. Are the islands related to her? She always sleeps on her left shoulder, which her brother repeatedly says is unhealthy. It will harm her, he says. When he leaves the room, she always turns back on her left shoulder. She wears white, and is very tall and fragile, with feet seemingly too small to support her. A visitor, Juan Manuel, says she looks like a seagull. She cries out.  Men fall in love with her, but she refuses to marry, even when she is in love.. At the end of the story, we discover Yolanda’s secret.. The connection between Yolanda and the islands is visceral, incomprehensible, but undoubtedly exists.

Brilliantly imaginative and beautifully written, each story reveals a different aspect of our lives and dreams.  This is a book to reread and reinterpret. Bombal has her own secrets, but does not reveal them to the reader on one reading.