Where the Women Are

In this magnificent novel, Pombo describes the splendour and decline of a family group which apparently believed it-self to be perfect. The narrator, the eldest daughter of the family, had thought that all of her relatives - her eccentric mother, her sister Violeta and brother Fernandito, her still more eccentric aunt Lucia, and the latest German lover - were superior beings. They seemed to her to shine with their own light in the midst of the romantic landscape of the peninsula, almost an island, in which they lived, isolated and proudly disdainful of the flat reality of the age. However, a series of events (the reappearance of the until then forgotten father), and the uncovering of a family secret which affects her decisively, discovers to the narrator the true face - cold, practical, tyrannical, and in the end poisonous - of the mythicized inhabitants of the peninsular redoubt. The revelation will irredeemably change the course of her life, unbalancing that eccentric family equilibrium in which fathers, husbands, men, are much the same. They are interchangeable.