Teresa de la Parra impresionista

Las memorias de Mama Blanca is impressionistic like the painting on its cover. The latter's visible brush strokes of green, yellow and white create a portrait--one imagines the woman Blanca Nieves will become--that is static, delicate and feminine, qualities of the novel itself. Like the works of impressionist composers, who used short thematically autonomous forms such as nocturnes and arabesques, Las memorias is tableau of independent impressions or atmospheric fragments whose formal coherance is as rigourous as a string of hazy memories. It is static in the same way that memories are static, as mental images contradicting the passage of time. It is delicate in the same way that a Debussy prelude is delicate, where mood and colour predominate over action and strong emotion. And it is feminine in that its narrative impusle lacks the forward thrust of an idea whose inner logic demands, insists on being developped. Here being is more important than becoming.