In One in Me I Never Loved, acclaimed Chilean novelist Carla Guelfenbein offers a thoughtful and emotionally evocative meditation on the tension between freedom and possession in women's intimate relations. It is Margarita's 56th birthday, and she suspects her husband may be having an affair. She spends her day away from him on the Barnard campus, where she considers the recent, mysterious disappearance of her apartment building concierge, a woman she never really knew but now cannot stop thinking about. Interwoven with Margarita's story are parallel narratives from the 1940s, when Doris, the young lover of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, is getting her first taste of freedom, and the life of a young woman named Juliana is about to be changed forever.
Translated from the Spanish by Neil Davidson, the collagist quality of Guelfenbein's narrative provides the story with unexpected texture as these three women's lives overlap and diverge from one another in unexpected ways. While separately each plot--and Margarita's, in particular--may seem quietly contemplative, when threaded together, the three stories take on a new urgency that is enhanced by the novel's compact prose and all-in-one-day time frame. The women at the center of each narrative--Margarita, Doris and Juliana--may be different from one another in their circumstances and personalities, but the bittersweet ways in which they grapple with their desires to belong to someone else, and yet simultaneously break free of expectations, underline the emotional acuity of Guelfenbein's novel. Even Margarita's neglectful husband receives the tender treatment of the author's humanist approach, which is dedicated to putting her characters' emotional nuances before cheap thrills. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor