Description

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Originally published in 1981 as En breve cárcel,Certificate of Absence is the first novel of the Argentinian scholar-critic Sylvia Molloy. Innovative in its treatment of women's relationships and in its assertion of woman's right to author her own text, the novel has won wide approval in Latin America and the United States.

The novel centers around a woman writing in a small room. As she writes, remembering a past relationship and anticipating a future one, the room becomes a repository for nostalgia, violence, and desire, a space in which writing and remembering become life-sustaining ceremonies. The narrator reflects on the power of love to both shelter and destroy. She meditates on the act of writing, specifically on writing as a woman, in a voice that goes against the grain of established, canonical voices.

Latin American male writers are prone to self-portrayal in their texts. Certifcate of Absence is one of the few novels by Latin American women that successfully use this technique to open new windows on women's experiences.

About the Author

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Sylvia Molloy is professor of Spanish at Yale University. Daniel Balderston is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University.

Praise For…

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. . . Molloy's first novel is something special. Her narrator is a writer and her writing is therapy. Through the act of creating literature, she deals with the loves and pains of her life: father, mother, lovers and friends. It is a rare writer who can cloister her fiction in introspection and still keep up a pace that exercises a reader . . . Molloy pulls this off.
— Washington International Arts Letter