ABSTRACT
This chapter explores briefly Clavel's relatively small-scale multimedia intervention for the promotion of Los deseos, demonstrating her nascent interest in this area. It focuses on Clavel's treatment of her female character within psychoanalytical framework, although brief treatment of the socio-historical and political perspective is deemed necessary as it is intertwined with the development of character as a subject in process of becoming. Soledad's fragmented self is seen in relation to the city trope which permeates Clavel's novel. Los deseos y su sombra, which was the runner-up for the Premio Internacional Alfaguara de Novela 1999, is outstanding novel in which the author skilfully interweaves the historical, the fictional, and fantastic to create original story of sexuality, desire, and the phantasmagoric. The blurring of fact and fiction highlights the relative nature of truth, and the unreliability of language to convey monological truth, through various discourses — journalistic, political, historical — thus representing alternative visions to a single historical 'truth'.
