SOURCE: “Mist, Light and the Libido: La Ultima Niebla,” in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1979, pp. 231-42.

Here, Orlandi presents a psychological reading of Bombal's novella.

Novels of the early twentieth century such as Alsino, El hermano asno, and Don Segundo Sombra, through their poetic and lyrical texture, together with the spiritual and psychological identification of author and character, influenced the continent's subsequent development of modern fiction. Old themes and atmospheres prevailed under new perspectives with writers no longer treating the conflict between man and his world but rather their fusion. From about 1935 we may speak of the emergence of a new novel in which an anguished search for the meaning of human destiny finds expression in themes of existentialist suffering and mythical reality. Weighed down by the devastation of world war, the depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler, the threat of atomic powers, and...