People in the Room

Originally published in 1950, this disquieting novel from Argentinean Lange centers on a teenager’s voyeuristic relationship with her neighbors. In Buenos Aires, a 17-year-old girl obsessively observes the trio of sisters (all older than her, though their exact age is never specified) across the street who spend every evening “sitting in the drawing room, one of them slightly removed from the others.” The narrator is convinced they must be “hiding something tragic,” and that the woman who sits separately, the eldest, is “guilty of the crime I knew nothing about.” Desperate for answers, the narrator intercepts a telegram, then uses it as a pretext to gain entry into the house. The sisters welcome her, and she quickly becomes a fixture of their “stubborn, unchanging evenings,” wherein the appearance of a spider and the switching on of an overhead light rate as major incidents. The narrator’s early theories about the eldest sister’s supposed criminal past are abandoned as she learns more about the family’s sad history; instead, she becomes convinced they are already dead. Much like the sisters themselves, Lange’s novel is “painstakingly solemn and vague.” Though this inscrutability is at times frustrating, Lange’s ability to magnify the tension of the uncertainty surrounding the sisters’ loneliness transforms this largely uneventful novel into a nerve-wracking ghost story. (Aug.)