8 - The distant death of a female body in Carla Guelfenbein’s Contigo en la distancia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
Summary
Contigo en la distancia (2015) by the Chilean novelist, Carla Guelfenbeim, begins like Laura Restrepo's Delirio (2004) and Alejandra Jaramillo Morales's Acaso la muerte (2010), with the mystery of an inert, female body. There is also the common thread of a mysterious concoction of death, madness and torture associated with the inert female body discovered in the opening pages of these two Colombian novels, although Guelfenbeim's novel is different in that the death happens peacefully in a hospital, the madness is literary and the torture is psychological. The fact that the main female protagonist of Contigo en la distancia, Vera Sigall, dies peacefully, indeed, makes it more difficult to argue that this novel is primordially focussed on violence against women (VAW), as are the other three novels studied in this section and in Section I (Delirio, Acaso la muerte, and Fuerzas especiales). But the case can be made of Guelfenbein's novel as long as we re-baptize the oppression felt by the fairer sex in terms of epistemic violence. For Contigo en la distancia is more literary in tonality than the other three novels because of its deliberative elusiveness. Thus it starts seemingly as a murder mystery but then gradually – a little like the roaming camera-eye in Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mama también (2001) that gets bored with the script – seems to tire of its genre-destiny and takes to exploring other avenues of emplotment, which take the reader by surprise, ranging from the sudden emergence of the jealous and jilted wife syndrome, to the reversal of the relationship between biography and the novel form to such an extent that a real biographer gets a walk-on part, and followed by many mise-en-abyme scenes; that said, the novel really takes flight when asserting itself as an over-obvious roman à cléf in which the female protagonist is a Chilean version of the famous Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector, and ends up as the tale of how a graduate student discovers that the famous writer on whom she decided to write her doctoral thesis happens to be the grandmother she never knew.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022