SOURCE: Chanady, Amaryll B. “Cristina Peri Rossi and the Other Side of Reality.” Antigonish Review 54 (summer 1983): 44–48.

In the following essay, Chanady examines the unique perspective in Peri Rossi's work and argues that through Peri Rossi's prose “we get a different insight into our own experiences and the world around us.”

The first time I saw Cristina Peri Rossi was in Paris, at a conference on Latin American Literature held at the Unesco. She was sitting between her famous Uruguayan compatriot, Mario Benedetti, and the novelist Antonio Skármeta from Chile. The three were being interviewed in front of a group of professors, whose eyes would wander from the faces of the authors to the brilliant water jugs, and occasionally to some distant point as they gave in to the drowsiness of the fourth day of lectures and discussion. What immediately drew my attention to the figure in the...