Novel
The Inhabited Woman
La mujer habitada
Gioconda Belli · 1988
Synopsis
Lavinia, twenty-three, returns from Europe with an architecture degree, settles into the house left to her by her aunt Inés and joins a firm, where she meets Felipe, an underground activist of the National Liberation Movement. Their relationship draws her little by little into the struggle against the dictatorship. In her garden, a flowering orange tree harbours the soul of Itzá, an Indian warrior who fought the conquistadors alongside her beloved Yarince; in chapters of her own, Itzá tells of her life long ago and prepares to inhabit the young woman.
Context
A poet who had been awarded a prize ten years earlier, the author published this first novel in 1988. In it she transposes her own clandestine involvement of the seventies to an imaginary country, and gives her heroine, as she herself had, a bourgeois family and a European education. Critics see it as the first narrative to raise the question of women in the literature of the Nicaraguan revolution; Itzá's voice opens nine of its twenty-eight chapters.
Who it is for
A novel of medium length, in two alternating voices. The contemporary narrative and the indigenous narrative answer each other.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some twenty languages and often reissued, it appeared in French only in 2024, in an edition revised by the author.
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