Dream of Reason

Chacel's modernist novel, published in her native Spain in 1960, takes encyclopedic stock of the “intimate life of ideas.” Santiago Hernández, a bourgeois Argentine, writes a rambling “confession” that opens with first love—for the beautiful and self-destructive dancer Elfriede Pabst, whom he encounters in Europe and meets again much later to disastrous effect. Santiago returns to Buenos Aries just before the Spanish Civil War, inherits both a factory and a palatial estancia and blossoms from “a man delirious with desire for things to being a man who is a master of things.” But the bulk of the book (and of Santiago's life) is concerned with his marriage to the Cuban Quitina, whose evolution into mature sensuality is a triumph. Against a backdrop of world-shattering events, the impact of art and thought informs elegantly drawn conversations (including a sustained riff on Oedipus where Quitina rewrites the myth from a proto-feminist perspective). Chacel's masterpiece is a book where the death of a fly provides as much opportunity for self-knowledge as “love's pure drift.” (Oct.)