Reseña del libro "The Separated Woman (en Inglés)"
At its core and immediately evident, THE SEPARATED WOMAN is a mystery or psychological thriller. It has a detective, dead and defiled women, and a serial-murderer (who may also be the narrator). It begins when, neither knowing who the other is, the narrator and detective meet in a café. The entire book is that meeting.The encounter may or may not be an accident, and this relationship (unwinding throughout the novel) propels the narrator to ever more ruinous levels of mental rigor, obstinacy and conciliation…and since we are unavoidably trapped in his head, this involves us directly.The narrator speaks in a reasonable way, but the longer he goes on, the more the reader feels the oddness of his speech. He never takes a breath. He keeps on, pulling you in, but never pauses. Soon it becomes evident that this novel unravels in one single sentence. What ensues—what THE SEPARATED WOMAN really is—is a kind of parody or inversion, and ultimately, a word and thought defying lesson in the banality of evil.Reasoning with a view toward simultaneity and compression, the author has conceived a language without time. It's an interplay of continuous impressions, formed from a series of unrelenting attributes, all piled one upon another. In a structural sense, everything that happens, happens at once.This idea leads to the one continuous sentence, suitably descriptive for a combination of detailed yet speculative narration. Yet it's not just one more attempt at stream of consciousness. Too often such portrayals force into the essential narrative snippets of daily life, as though that’s how the mind works. Rather the author believes that when the mind faces unsought disruption, it’s for dire concerns: life, death, and the why of existence. This one sentence must include those, but they remain consistent with the core narration.Yet, still, adopting such an extreme style is unavoidably concerning. “I never set out to do it. Simply I began with the idea of a tight, simple plot: a conversation between two supposed strangers (who might have a fatal connection) late one night in a café. The goal was an intrinsic entanglement. But I got about thirty pages in before I realized it was still one sentence. Yet I liked the effect. So I kept going. And at a certain point (I don’t know myself where that was) it felt essential to end the sentence only when the end was truly at hand.”To the question of whether a one-sentence novel is valid, you may read the linguist/philosopher Noam Chomsky, who writes, “...the language faculty...has the property of 'discrete' infinity. To put it simply, each sentence has a fixed number of words...and there is no limit in principle to how many words the sentence may contain...Without this capacity it might have been possible to 'think thoughts' of a restricted character, but with the capacity in place, the same conceptual apparatus would be freed for the construction of new thoughts and operations...”
