The Fourth World (Latin American Women Writers)

No one can be closer to another than a mother to her unborn child. No one, that is, except unborn twins jostling for space in the womb. In this concise and inventive novel, a twin brother and sister vie for attention from the reader much as they competed for room before their birth. Their prenatal intimacy and jealousy interlace until they can hardly recognize who is who. The chaos originating at the very moment of the twins’ conception gains dramatic proportions when they enter the world male and female. From the moment of their births, everything changes. The lives of the family members begin to unwind as they are each consumed by illness, obsession, and insanity. The inevitable and violent dissolution of the family becomes a metaphor in which Diamela Eltit explores the social crises in Chile during the military dictatorship of General Cesare Augusto Pinochet. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1949, Diamela Eltit now makes her home in Mexico as Chile’s cultural attaché. The Fourth World, first published in 1988, is her third novel. While other Chilean writers fled the military dictatorship that began in 1973, Eltit found no alternative but to join resistance groups and actively protest the government until democracy was restored in 1989. In the intervening years she learned the dual importance of concealment and discovery in language and the vital connections among story, politics, and personal survival.

Literature & Fiction

Eltit, Diamela

Contemporary

University Of Nebraska Press

No one can be closer to another than a mother to her unborn child. No one, that is, except unborn twins jostling for space in the womb. In this concise and inventive novel, a twin brother and sister vie for attention from the reader much as they competed for room before their birth. Their prenatal intimacy and jealousy interlace until they can hardly recognize who is who. The chaos originating at the very moment of the twins’ conception gains dramatic proportions when they enter the world male and female. From the moment of their births, everything changes. The lives of the family members begin to unwind as they are each consumed by illness, obsession, and insanity. The inevitable and violent dissolution of the family becomes a metaphor in which Diamela Eltit explores the social crises in Chile during the military dictatorship of General Cesare Augusto Pinochet. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1949, Diamela Eltit now makes her home in Mexico as Chile’s cultural attaché. The Fourth World, first published in 1988, is her third novel. While other Chilean writers fled the military dictatorship that began in 1973, Eltit found no alternative but to join resistance groups and actively protest the government until democracy was restored in 1989. In the intervening years she learned the dual importance of concealment and discovery in language and the vital connections among story, politics, and personal survival.

Chile's prize-winning novel of rebellious defiance in revolutionary prose--a feminist triumph of Joycean stature.

E. Luminata

United States

Lumen Books

“Custody of the Eyes is Helen Lane and Ronald Christ’s brilliant translation of Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994). In the novel, Eltit dramatizes voice, gender, and power in the relationship among mother, son, and father. As translators, Lane and Christ capture the intensity of expression that evokes, calls upon, even preys upon the figure of the mother as the lightning rod of power and repression in an oppressive society. Custody of the Eyes explores the climate of vigilance related not only to gender and familial relations but also to the social fabric torn by the Chilean experience of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Earlier translations of Eltit’s novels, such as Fourth World, Sacred Cow, and Ronald Christ’s E. Luminata, introduced English-language readers to Eltit’s radically experimental prose. Custody of the Eyes brings into English the challenging and questioning linguistic performance that sustains Eltit’s approach to the novelistic genre.”—Danny J. Anderson, editor, Pan-American Literature in Translation for the University of Texas Press
Diamela Eltit has “forged what is considered as one of the most risk-taking and consistent narrative projects to emerge in Chile in the last decades.”—Mary Green, University of Manchester
Jean Franco describes the goals of Eltit’s fiction: “to act against the authoritarian state, to take literature symbolically into the most marginal of spaces, to work against the easy readability of the commercial text, to foreground the woman’s body as a site of contention, to increase or exaggerate the marginality of art, and juxtapose literature’s marginality to that of prostitutes, vagabonds, and the homeless.”

Custody of the Eyes

“Another splendid book by Diamela Eltit, Chile’s most celebrated experimental writer. In collaboration with renowned photographer Paz Errázuriz, Eltit questions the lovers’ discourse—how this magic is born, how it is sustained and nourished—and roots her perspective in those outcasts whom society has condemned to the margins. These abject figures, locked for life in a psychiatric institution for the poor and insane, are the protagonists of this beautiful book about love; they are the guardians of what Eltit describes as ‘that mysterious symbolic disorder’ which nothing in medical science can ever come close to explaining. Soul’s Infarct is certain to embrace the reader who in turn will recall the power of love as a moment in which the senses override the intellect, an instant when we surrender ourselves to the tremulous body of desire, to hunger for the other to reach a transgressive bliss. Award-winning translator Ronald Christ is unique in his ability to tease out the subtle rhythms of Eltit’s text and bring to English-language readers the sublime poetic prose of Soul’s Infarct.”—Francine Masiello, University of California at Berkeley
“Binocular: visual and verbal lenses, individual but parallel in focus, Soul’s Infarct brings up close—brings us up close—to the distanced, the unmentionable, the unsightly: crazy people, who yet are people in love, witnessing their immense emotion before Paz Errázuriz’s welcoming camera, conveying their unknown and unknowable selves and histories through Diamela Eltit’s transformative, recording word. Soul’s Infarct is doubly unique.”—Catalina Parra

Soul's Infarct

Helen Lane Books

A shocking new voice in latin American literature.

Sacred Cow (Masks)

Serpent's Tail

Never Did the Fire unfolds in the humdrum of everyday working class existence, making the afterlife of an agitator that of anyone living next door. For one old couple, brought together years ago in an underground cell, the revolution has ended in a small apartment, a grinding job caring for the bodies of the unwell well-to-do, and all the aches and pains that go with a long life and a long marriage. Untethered from the political action that defined them, and mourning the loss of their child, their bonds dissolve, but the consequences of their former life, and their dependence on each other, won't let them go.A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit is at the height of her powers in this novel of breakdowns. Never Did the Fire evokes the charged air of Chile's violent past, and the burdens it carries into the present-day, when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation.

Never Did the Fire

Literary

Charco Press

Diamela Eltit: Essays on Chilean Literature, Politics, and Culture

History & Criticism

Ubiquity Press (Latin America Research Commons)

An unnamed woman-a mother-struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman-a mother-struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) presents letters bookended by dense ramblings by the mother's son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his "vessels," hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, and withdrawing-a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body-the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.

Custody of the Eyes (Sternberg Press / Montana)

Arts & Photography

Sternberg Press

El infarto del alma

Errázuriz, Paz

Laura Carrascosa Vela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eltit, Diamela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Eltit, Diamela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eltit, Diamela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Fourth World (Latin American Women Writers)

The Fourth World (Latin American Women Writers)

E. Luminata

Custody of the Eyes

Soul's Infarct

Sacred Cow (Masks)

Never Did the Fire

Diamela Eltit: Essays on Chilean Literature, Politics, and Culture

Custody of the Eyes (Sternberg Press / Montana)

El infarto del alma