ABSTRACT
The most marked characteristic of Luisa Valenzuela’s fiction is a pushing against censorship of all kinds. She said, in an unpublished interview of 1984: “Yo creo que las cosas hay que decirlas. Que lo que se tiene que evitar son las barreras de la autocensura, o peor que la autocensura, las barreras de esa censura interna que te impide decir ciertas verdades, y que te impide decir así, lo que en el fondo uno está queriendo decir, sin saberlo.” (I believe that things must be said. That what must be avoided are the barriers of self-censorship, or worse than self-censorship, the barriers of that internal censorship which prevents you from saying that which deep down you really want to say without realising it). This striving for a kind of freedom takes the form of writing which often plays with language, with shifting narrators, with perceptions of the unconscious, and reveals tremendous humour.
