El cuarto mundo

In The Fourth World, the third novel in Diamela Eltit’s prolific career, a twin brother and sister compete for the reader’s attention in the same way that, before being born, they competed for space in the mother’s womb, the place of enunciation chosen by the writer to make her characters speak at the beginning of this story. As usual, using a lyrical language that challenges and captivates, Eltit explores the limits of narration to critically address the family universe and motherhood, the construction of gender, the roles socially assigned to men and women, and the materiality of the female body as the center of power relations. The novel was published in 1988, still in the context of Chilean dictatorial repression. Eltit describes in these terms what it was like to write literature in that fateful period: “I wrote in that environment, I would almost say obsessively, not because I believed that what I was doing was a material contribution to anything, but because it was the only way I could save my own honour. When my freedom – I don’t mean this in the literal sense, but in all its symbolic breadth – was threatened, I took the liberty of writing freely. But that did not make up for the humiliation, the fear, the pain, or the helplessness for the victims of the system: writing in that space was something passionate and personal. My secret political resistance. When you live in an environment that is collapsing, writing a book can perhaps be one of the few gestures of survival.”