A young woman in Buenos Aires spies three women in the house across the street from her family’s home. Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences. Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.

People in the Room

Literature & Fiction

Lange, Norah

Literary

And Other Stories

Product Description A series of luminous vignettes describe the childhood of Argentina’s rediscovered modernist writer. Self-contained, interconnected fragments begin with her family’s departure to Mendoza in 1910 and end with their return to Buenos Aires and the death of her father in 1915.Lange’s notes tell intimate, half-understood stories from the seemingly peaceful realm of childhood, a realm inhabited by an eccentric narrator searching for clues on womanhood and her own identity. She watches: her pubescent older sister, bathing naked in the moonlight; the death of a horse; and herself, a changeable and untimely girl. How she cried, when lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and how she laughed, climbing onto the kitchen roof in men’s clothing and throwing bricks to announce her performance.Lange makes her domestic setting into a laboratory where strangeness and eroticism combine in delicate, daring flashes of literary brilliance. Review “[Lange’s] stark, dreamy and often morbid observations that read like windows into the soul . . . Eccentric and obsessive, Lange reveals herself to be a born surrealist, examining and interpreting situations and people from elliptical angles.” ―Catherine Taylor, Irish Times“A muse to the young Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange was herself a profoundly gifted writer, one capable of drawing her readers back in time, plunging you into a lost world of soulful horseback riding on the pampas and bucolic women’s sewing rooms. Her Notes from Childhood is an endearing, mesmerizing, unforgettable masterpiece through which we can see anew the private history of women in Latin America. Read Norah and be bewitched.”―Pola Oloixarac “One of the most beautiful and luminous books of childhood memoirs ever written in Latin America, so rich in the genre.”–César Aira“The postcards of gender construction in Notes from Childhood are a delight . . . as is her exquisite prose. The fact that Lange has been considered a secondary figure speaks only of the strict hierarchy of themes that regulated, and in my opinion, continues to regulate entry into the canon.”–Marina Yuszczuk“The apparently peaceful realm of childhood where the book was set concealed the fact that the text turned memories of a life into a literary investigation, the setting of childhood into an often disturbing laboratory.”–Silvia Molloy“Lange never lacked recognition from writers: César Aira, Elvio Gandolfo, and Arturo Carrera have described her as one of the greats of Argentine literature.” –Adriana Astutti, Clarin“If the same book had been published in Oslo or Budapest, or in Leipzig, not to mention Paris, it would now be as famous the world over as The Story of San Michele by Axel Monthe, with which it has more than one thing in common.” –Eduardo González Lanuza About the Author Born in 1905 to Norwegian parents in Buenos Aires, Norah Lange was a key figure in the Argentine avant-garde of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though she began her career writing poetry, her first major success came in 1937 with her memoir Notes from Childhood, followed by the companion memoir Before They Die, and the novels People in the Room and The Two Portraits. She contributed to the magazines Proa and Martín Fierro, and was a friend to figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca. From her teenage years, when her family home became the site of many literary gatherings, Norah was at the heart of Buenos Aires’ literary scene. She travelled widely alone and with her husband, always returning to Buenos Aires, where she continued to write and host literary gatherings. She died in 1972.Charlotte Whittle has translated works by Silvia Goldman, Jorge Comensal and Rafael Toriz, among others. She has been instrumental in bringing Lange to audiences in English. With People in the Room she was longlisted for the American Literary Translators Association prize and shortlisted for both the Warwic

Notes from Childhood

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Cuadernos de infancia

Editorial Renacimiento

Transforming the reader into a spy, this exhibitionist and voyeuristic game of a novel has as its protagonist a woman who observes three women from the window of her house as they interact in the living room of the house across the street. She studies them obsessively every afternoon and anxiously awaits the moment when she can sit by the window and begin her observations for the day. This woman's form of spying is unconsciously geared toward answering the age-old question What does it mean to be a woman? Convirtiendo al lector en espía, esta novela con sabor a juego exhibicionista y de voyeur tiene como personaje principal a una mujer que observa desde la ventana de su casa a tres mujeres instaladas en la sala de la casa de enfrente. Las estudia obsesivamente cada tarde y espera con ansiedad el momento de situarse en el salón para comenzar sus observaciones. El espionaje de esta mujer va inconscientemente dirigido a desentrañar la vieja pregunta ¿Qué significa ser mujer?

Personas en la sala (Spanish Edition)

United States

Ediciones Barataria

El tomo 1 tiene una noticia de Cesar Aira, un prologo de Sylvia Molloy y comprende las siguientes obras de Norah Lange: TOMO 1 La calle de la tarde (1925, poemas) Los dias y las noches (1926, poemas) Voz de vida (1927, novela epistolar) El rumbo de la rosa (1930, poemas) 45 dias y 30 marineros (1933, novela) Cuadernos de infancia (1937)

Obras Completas/ the Complete Works: 2 (Spanish Edition)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Beatriz Vierbo Editora

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

Books by Lange, Norah