Epifanía de una sombra, by Mauricio Wacquez: A Preliminary Approach

he Chilean novelist Mauricio Wacquez (1939-2000) spent much of the eighteen years that preceded his death working o n the manuscript of La oscuridad, an ambitious narrative that would re-create, in thinT ly disguised fictional form, the intellectual and sensory experience of Wacquez’s lifetime. Wacquez had previously published in Chile the volume of short stories Cinco y unaficciones (1963) and the novel Toda la luz del mediodta ( I % 5 ) , both works of a literary apprentice, and Excesos ( l97 l ) , brief narratives that earned the esteem ofJulio Cortizar. Wacquez’s works published after he took up residence in Spain in 197% are among the most interesting experimental works written in Spanish in the last fifty years. Parkntesis (1975) presents in a single sentence, some eighty pages long, the ever-shifting recollections and streams of consciousness of four lovers, with just a nuance of a narratorial voice as magister ludi. Frente a un hombre armado ( 1 98 1) is a stunningly ambitious novel, with its temporal, geographical, and linguistic complexity, its reversal of sexual roles and defiance of taboo, its brilliant pastiche of the nineteenth-century French novel, its exploration of dream, myth, and obsession, and its powerful rendering of the dialectics of power, as expressed in sexual subjugation and violence. Ella o elsuefio de nadie ( 1 982) is an intellectual tour de force, an elaborate play of mirrors in which a privileged narrator explores and coniinents the shifting perspec-