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He Who SearchesAuthor: Luisa Valenzuela Translator: Helen Lane Latin American Literature Series March 1987 134 pages, 5.5 x 8 Dimensions: Paperback, 0-916583-20-1 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $7.96—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early hours of the morning on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to Mexico to Buenos Aires, but above all it is about Argentina: its recent history, its 30,000 missing children, its stunned middle class, its writers in exile.
He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure, combining narrative references to old-fashioned storytelling, realism, psychoanalysis, feminism, politics, and suspense, all of them tinged with a patina of eroticism that reflects a feminist perspective. Ultimately the disguises of the plot—transvestism, transsexualism, differing sexual points of view—become pieces in a puzzle that can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Buenos Aires: "He returns to his Latin America, and for the first time, recognizes it." He who searches, finds.
About the Author
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Luisa Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her mother, Luisa Mercedes Levinson, was a well-known writer and among the close friends who visited their home were Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Goyanarte, Eduardo Mallea, and Ernesto Sabato. Valenzuela started her career as a journalist when she was very young. She also published a few short stories before 1958, when she moved to France. Her first novel was published while she was living in Paris. In 1969 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to participate in a program for international writers in Iowa. During the 1970s, Valenzuela traveled to Spain, the United States, France, and Mexico, and her travels deeply influenced her work. During this period, the military regime completely changed Argentinian reality, a situation fully represented in her writings published during these years. In 1979, Valenzuela moved to New York to be writer-in-residence at Columbia University, where she gave workshops in English and Spanish. |
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About the Translator
| Helen Lane was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Nélinda Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte. |
Praise
"Luisa Valenzuela is the heiress of Latin American fiction. She wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked."—Carlos Fuentes"Luisa Valenzuela explores the terrain where love and violence, erotic pleasure and death, exist perilously close to each other . . . Valenzuela plays with words, turns them inside out, weaves them into sensuous webs."—Voice Literary Supplement
"He Who Searches is as stunning a portrait of Latin America and its strange, magical realities as the portraits found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra. And like those novels, it is also a work of universal appeal."—San Francisco Chronicle
"This novel . . . is a prime example of contemporary Latin American fiction. Its major themes are love, identity, reality, time, existence, and death, expressed with an innovative narrative structure and point of view, through myriad symbols and against a political and feminist backdrop."—Choice
"To read her is to enter our reality fully, where plurality surpasses the limitations of the past; to read her is to participate in a search for Latin American identity, which offers its rewards beforehand. Luisa Valenzuela's books are our present, but they also contain much of the future; there is a true resplendence, true love, true freedom on each of her pages."—Julio Cortazar