Inhabited woman
Inhabited Woman (Spanish La Mujer Habitada ) is a novel by the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli . The original in Spanish was published in 1988.
The strongly autobiographical novel describes the life and love story of Lavinia Alarcón and Felipe Iturbe, who get to know each other in an architecture office in Faguas, the capital of a fictional Latin American country modeled on Nicaragua , both of whom participate in the resistance against the regime of the "great general" and perish in the process.
content
The novel tells of the resistance in two strands: In one strand, an indigenous woman named Itzá from the 16th century, who was reborn in the shape of an orange tree, remembers her fight with her lover Yarince against the Spanish conquistadors. The orange tree stands in front of the house of the young architect Lavinia, who is about to take up her first job in an architecture office. This is the other, the main strand of the novel. When Lavinia eats the oranges on the tree, she is inspired by the resistance spirit of the native woman. She falls in love with her colleague Felipe, who one night brings the wounded resistance fighter Sebastián into her house. As a result, Lavinia, who comes from one of the country's middle-class families, begins to decide, with the help of the nurse Flor, who treated the injured Sebastian, to participate in the resistance against the "great general". When General Vela, one of the dictator's followers, commissioned the architects' office to build a magnificent villa, Lavinia was entrusted with this project. To her surprise, in order not to attract attention, she has to return to the bourgeois world of her origin and take part in a debutante ball in a low-cut dress that she thought she had taken off forever, which was totally annoying to her. But she is also completing military weekend training and, through her work on the house of the gruesome torturer Vela, provides the resistance with detailed information that enables a bigger blow, Operation Eureka. Taxis are required for this as inconspicuous cars; When Felipe tries to commandeer one, the taxi driver shoots him believing he is a common robber. Lavinia has to take his place and participates in the attack on the house she built for General Vela, whom she finally discovered hidden in his armory and shot, although she was also fatally wounded in the process. The native woman hidden in the orange tree has the last word: "The torch is lit, no one will be able to extinguish it."
meaning
In its structure , it is a work committed to the magical realism and the dictator novel of Latin America, which does not succeed seamlessly in integrating the two narrative strands, resistance against the Conquista and Sandinista resistance against the Somoza regime of the 1970s, especially since the author's strong feminist concerns are also completely brings an unmagical dimension to the book. Nevertheless, the novel gives a good insight into the way of thinking and acting of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional , in which the author took an active part, albeit not with the loss of her life. Idania Fernandez , also born in the Nicaraguan capital Managua (which is called Faguas in the novel ) and is only three and a half years younger than the author, perished in this fight . Her biography also contributed to the shapes of Lavinia and Flor.
title
The title alludes to the physical condition of a woman during pregnancy. What is meant here, however, is the reborn Itzá, who sneaks into the protagonist's interior via enjoyed oranges, nests in her, does not control her development, but obviously influences and is even able to erase information from her consciousness. She does it once after Flor Lavinia told something about the (historical, 18th century) cacique Yarince , which Itzás believes can only discourage Lavinia because it is known that Yarince loses his life in battle.
expenditure
- Gioconda Belli: Inhabited woman , translated from Nicaruan Spanish by Lutz Kliche . Munich (DTV), 1991 ISBN 978-3-423-21011-9 (c) 1988 of the German-language edition: Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal