Mean Woman: Mina Cruel

by Alicia Borinsky, Cola Franzen (Introduction)

What is a woman to do? Mean Woman raises and answers the question time and again. The female characters in the novel rule countries, are oppressed, and rise again individually and in groups. Shifting scenes of Latin American politics are evoked in kaleidoscopic play. Swaggering heroines of tango, the Argentines Eva and Isabelita Perón, the itinerant Filipina Imelda Marcos, and their male consorts may be glimpsed in a vision whose sustained humor dazzles us with the conundrums of violence, machismo, and exile.

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Alicia Borinsky, born in Buenos Aires, is a novelist, poet and literary critic. Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. Her critical work has helped frame the discussion about the writers of the Latin American Boom or Boom latinoamericano, an important movement in Latin American literature. Among her other scholarly achievements is the introduction of the figure of Macedonio Fernández—Borges’s master—to a wider reading public, the exploration of the intersection between literary theory, cultural and gender studies and numerous works about poetry, Latino writers and World literature.

Alicia Borinsky has won several awards for her work, including the Latino Literature Prize in 1996 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Literary critic and Professor of English at Princeton University, Michael Wood, said of Low Blows, "Low Blows is a book of surprises, full of turns of language and imagination which constantly catch us off guard. This is why it is so strange that we should finally know where we are, and why we are lucky to make it back to the once familiar world. We are so used to solemn failures of sight that we scarcely know what to do with lightness of glance and many-angled vision." Peter Bush, Director of the Centre for Literary Translation, writes, "No one else writing today can quite emulate her cartoon prose, a shotgun marriage of comic and camp, the Borgesian and the Barthesian." Acclaimed Argentine author of Santa Evita Tomas Eloy Martinez, writes, "Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros...Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernandez and Julio Cortazar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts." Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela writes, of Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer,The reward does not consist in the suspension of disbelief. It consists in another belief that will open wide the doors for us to go out and play." Marguerite Feitlowitz, Professor of literature at Bennington College, author of "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of torture" is quoted in the back cover of "Golpes bajos/Low Blows" Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, March 2007 saying that "No one working today writes like Alicia Borinsky, whose words explode off the page. The voices in her work arise organically, and their accents and articulations, textures and quirks, are integral, authentic. Each of these voices (and there are scores) has its own palpable history: we feel it, even when its detailed particulars are withheld".

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this at the amazing Stanford Bookstore back in the day. Borinsky was a scholar who wrote about the Chilean novelist José Donoso, who was the subject of my dissertation. I was curious about Borinsky as fiction writer, a curiosity I’ve managed to delay satisfying for three decades.

Borinsky is Argentine, one of the many, many Argentine writers I have read since beginning this reading project. If I did not know before that Argentina has produced an extraordinarily fertile literary culture for a very long time, I certainly do now.

Although both setting and time period are vague, "Mean Woman" seems to be set in Argentina in the twentieth century, from about the time of Peron to the Dirty War dictatorship of the 1970-80s. I would call this a dictatorship novel, a subgenre of the Latin American novel, although it might be better labeled a novel about the world of mostly politicized authoritarian male behavior, since not all the male figures in the novel are dictators or politicians but all aspire to authoritarian dominance. More to the point, "Mean Woman" is about the path of a woman–or a set of women who seem to develop out of the first, archetypal(?) woman Borinsky introduces–through an ever changing and challenging authoritarian landscape.

That first woman is virginal, virtuous, bookish, friendly, dreamy, and creative. In the subsequent figures, they read as if Borinsky is adapting this original figure to different authoritarian realities to find position, power, and expression. The women in this novel more often than not remind me of the women in "Don Quijote," who while often appearing as damsels in distress, like Dorotea, are not and use the guise of distress to assert their power and dominate others. Throughout the novel, woman find creative ways around fathers, husbands, generals, soldiers, politicians, priests, and functionaries to sometimes free themselves and other times dominate more effectively and ruthlessly than the men. I recently read Rosario Ferré’s "The Youngest Doll," where the women in the stories are seeking to escape the pressures of an abject and decadent society. In "Mean Woman," some of the women would escape while others are too drawn to power to not vie for dominance by whatever means they can manage.

But, whatever it suffers, male power does not subside. By the end of the novel, the country–still run by men, the muchachos–has created an intelligence agency whose purpose is to neutralize female power, like by shipping Eva Peron’s body around the world, or creating faux exiles–replicas of exotic European locales–in underground bunkers where powerful women can be distracted and kept out of the way. The program is so successful that the country advertises it as a place where other countries can rid themselves of their own dictators. A gender neutral service.

Borinsky offers no solutions. A country that accepts or accedes to dictatorship and the false promises dictatorships offer can only be tempted by more false promises even in the face of poverty, unemployment, lack of food and hunger. Dour book. Dour fable.

[Izy Carney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woah. Don’t try to understand this book—after reading it twice I think it is more supposed to wash over you if that makes sense. A fable-like warning of ambition and power. This is a biting critique of Argentina’s rapidly changing governments in the 70s and the 80s and the state violence that came with it. Even though the introduction to the book paints it as some type of tale about female empowerment and the many ways women subverted sexism and sexual violence, I read it more as a warning of how women hungry for power benefit from and perpetuate those same systems, while never really winning because structurally they exist within the same sexist capitalistic system. Also about countries and nationalism and the violence inherent in both. A cautionary tale!!