Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women of Argentina and Chile.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

The tables of contents of many thematic anthologies read like the syllabus of a university literature course. Stories are thrown together for no reason other than that they illustrate a particular approach to a topic, or because they were written by authors of a particular sex, nationality or affiliation. In contrast, Secret Weavers reads more like a novel than a collection of works by diverse authors. The stories flow into one another, each unique, yet essential to the whole. Through her careful selection of material, Marjorie Agosin weaves a magical web that ensnares and enchants her readers.

In her introduction, Agosin analyzes the development of fantastic literature in Latin America. For Jorge Luis Borges, she points out, the fantastic involves the articulation of a new language through which the author creates a space where the line between fantasy and reality is blurred, where the supernatural is commonplace and the mundane is imbued with magic. Luisa Valenzuela clarifies that Latin American fantastic literature is not surrealistic, but rather, absolutely realistic, for the Latin American concept of reality, influenced by the animism and cosmovision of ancient peoples, includes the wondrous as well as the ordinary.

Michael Batkin sees the fantastic as a means of subverting authority and searching for deeper truths. The women in this anthology do indeed, as Agosin says, "subvert codes and pre-established styles in order to transgress the forbidden." It is not surprising that women have excelled in the fantastic genre, explains Agosin, for "Women writers, who have been considered marginal and thus underrated and obliged to exercise a sense of self-censorship in their writing whether in Europe, Latin America or Africa, have had to invent strategies to survive, ways to tell, narrate and be free."

Secret Weavers includes many well known Southern Cone writers--including one Uruguayan--whose works have already been translated into English (Maria Luisa Bombal, Silvina Ocampo, Luisa Valenzuela, Isabel Allende, Cristina Peri Rossi), as well as writers whose works appear here in English for the first time (Ana Maria Shua, Luisa Mercedes Levinson). The selections run the gamut from innovative pre-boom fantasies that challenge conventional chronology and narrative techniques to the very latest in magical realism and beyond. The five stories by Silvina Ocampo incorporate many themes cultivated by Borges and Ocampo's husband Adolfo Bioy Casares...