SOURCE: "Autumn of the Matriarch?," in The Nation, Vol. 260, No. 9, March 6, 1995, pp. 316-19.

In the review below, Stavans reads autobiographical aspects of Valenzuela's life into Bedside Manners.

Carlos Fuentes once rather pompously referred to Luisa Valenzuela as "the heiress of Latin American fiction" who "wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked." That was in the early eighties, when her dislike of dogmas and certainties, her explorations of the uses of ambiguity, her forays into "that reflective field where reality appears at its most real" were the constant subjects of features, book reviews and heavy literary commentary, a time when she could reign unchallenged as the best-known and most-translated contemporary woman writer of the Southern Hemisphere. But things have changed dramatically since then. The region's literature is in crisis today, with luminaries like Valenzuela seemingly unable to find a way out of their artistic quagmire.

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