La última niebla Reading Order

La última niebla (The Final Mist, 1935) by María Luisa Bombal is the founding text of Chilean literary surrealism and one of the most important novels by a Latin American woman writer of the twentieth century — a short, dreamlike novel in which a woman in an unhappy marriage retreats into a world of sensory fantasy and imagined love, and the novel never tells us where the real ends and the dream begins. The unnamed narrator is married to a man who is still in love with his dead first wife; she sleeps with (or imagines sleeping with) a stranger in the fog; over the years, she loses track of whether the encounter actually happened. Bombal's prose is the instrument: dense with sensory imagery, resistant to linear narrative, structured by emotional logic rather than event. La última niebla was written in Buenos Aires, where Bombal had gone after escaping a violent relationship in Chile, and was read in manuscript by Borges, who arranged for its publication. The novel was revolutionary in 1935 Latin American literature — not because it was political or because it engaged the social question, but because it engaged female interiority and female desire with a directness and formal sophistication that had no precedent in Latin American fiction. García Márquez read it; Fuentes read it; Donoso read it. La amortajada (The Shrouded Woman, 1938), in which a dead woman narrates her own wake, is its companion and sequel in spirit.