Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women

Carvalho's monograph represents a ground-breaking synthesis of locational feminism, cultural geographies, and the strategies by which five of Spanish America's most widely read women authors construct identity and question societal hierarchies through the negotiation of space, power, and agency. The author, Professor of Spanish at the University of Kentucky, provides a compelling study that resists totalizing views of “the Latin American woman” as it explores the “geographic de-centering” that is characteristic of much of contemporary Spanish-American women's fiction (7, 8). As Carvalho observes, the region's literature “lends itself in a very particular way to analysis from the geographic perspective, because it has for centuries functioned as a contact zone in terms of race, class, and economic interests” (9). Her readings of Laura Restrepo (Colombia), Isabel Allende (Chile), Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico), Sara Sefchovich (Mexico), and Angeles Mastretta (Mexico) explore female characters’ navigation of space in light of “not only where she is but who put her there, with what authority and methodology, whether that placement is tolerable, and whether it is alterable” via an innovative “three-dimensional imagined geography” grounded in the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Susan Stanford Friedman (1). While this study respects the unique nature of each popular novel that it explores, it also notes that these representative works are linked by “restlessness” and the “collapse” of “traditional domestic architecture” rooted in “fixity,” as well as by their female protagonists’ creation – with varying degrees of success – of spaces for agency and satisfying “vocation” (185–6)

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