Streams of Silver: Six Contemporary Women Writers from Argentina.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Reviewed by Barbara Mujica

Sidestepping internationally recognized authors such as Luisa Valenzuela, Monica R. Flori brings to the attention of Anglophone audiences six twentieth-century women writers little known outside of their native Argentina. Flori focuses on women of different generations whose work is representative of the mainstream national literature, yet at the same time helps to define the development of an Argentine feminine voice.

Flori begins with two mature writers, Alicia Jurado and Elvira Orphee. Jurado, like her male contemporaries Marco Denevi and Antonio Di Benedetto, was born in 1922. She shares with them a rejection of the aestheticism of the previous literary generation, an existentialist orientation, an interest in gender and generational strife, and a concern with the effects of Peronism. However, in contrast with those of her generation whose fiction is primarily political, Jurado seeks to create works - novels, biographies, and memoirs - that will entertain as well as provoke reflection. Orphee was born in 1930 but began publishing in 1956, five years before Jurado. Like Jurado, she belongs to the literary group known as "the angry ones" or "the patricidals" and, like her, was influenced by Peronism and existentialism. A strong neorealist strain is also evident in her writing, which focuses on "humiliated characters" who flounder in a "cursed environment" and are "stigmatized by a fatal flaw." Like those of the nineteenth-century naturalists, Orphee's characters are often misfits or social outcasts who struggle to defend themselves in hostile surroundings, frequently adopting violent, maniacal forms of behavior. Flori compares her work with that of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, for both convey a nihilistic, existential vision that stresses the absurdity of human existence.

Alina Diaconu (b. 1945) and Alicia Steimberg (b. 1933) are experimental writers who have produced a substantial body of work during a fairly short period. Born in Romania, Diaconu emigrated to Argentina in 1959. Her characters are often women, antiheroic males or androgynous people who have been marginalized by society. Using a narrative style that is deliberately ambiguous, fragmented, or distorted, she often creates a metatext that acts as a counterpoint to the primary text, offering multiple versions of a story and surprise endings. Flori explains that Diaconu developed a kind of allegorical fiction in response to political repression; through...