Mi abuela

Rafael Gumucio's grandmother would never forgive him for this book, one of the most notable in the new Latin American chronicle. And at the same time, in a hyperbole of the paradox that she loved being her, she would admire him with the same relish with which she adored the Proust of ladies and damsels. In this biography that crosses the Chilean 20th century, with literary ocean liners that go from Constantinople to Paris, the writer and journalist settles scores with the woman who was already mythical in life in a South American aristocracy full of frustration and contradictions. Gumucio's sophisticated grandmother supplants the absent father, the blurred mother, an elusive and chucaro country, distant and cold. Marta Rivas González died so that her grandson would tell her. Friend of famous writers -from Yourcenar, who pretended to her in vain, to García Márquez, who stopped seeing her without her ever claiming petty affection-, possible lover of many -Donoso wanted her as an alibi for his hidden homosexuality-, real lover of several whom he deplored as lousy.