21 Oct / One in Me I Never Loved by Carla Guelfenbein, translated by Neil Davidson [in Booklist]
Margarita’s fifty-sixth birthday begins with suspicion of her husband’s infidelities and ends with his WhatsApp declaration, “I love you and I’m with you.” In between, Margarita passes the day with women – in search of and in person – earning her “dazzling lucidity” by nighttime.
She spends the morning at Barnard on a bench created by artist Jenny Holzer, expecting to catch her Columbia professor husband cheating – unsurprisingly, he’s forgotten her birthday. The library provides clues as to where Anne, their missing building concierge, might have disappeared. Outside a pastry shop, her cellphone-less friend Juliana elicits her help in identifying a cryptic drawing. She gets drunk with Anne’s mother, Lucy, whose youthful ménage à trois might confirm Margarita’s theory of Anne’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, Carla Guelfenbein interweaves the tumultuous 1940s relationship between Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral and her American partner, Doris Dana, to further elucidate (and not) the converging connections. Guelfenbein, one of Chile’s globally bestselling authors – adroitly translated here by British-born, Chile-based Neil Davidson – charms and subverts with her polyphonic puzzle, quoting Jenny Holzer from start to finish, “Push yourself to the limit as often as possible.”
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, October 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2019 (Chile), 2021 (United States)