The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Personas en la sala (People in the Room). This is the second Lange book I have read but the first to be published in English, sixty-eight years after it first appeared in Spanish. It tells the story of a seventeen-year old woman who observes the three sisters who live in the house opposite and almost never leave the house or, indeed, the room. She wonders who they are and, eventually, gets to know them but still learns little about who they are. The whole story is told about the four women, as though sealed off from the rest of the world, with only occasional appearances by other, peripheral characters. There is a feeling of death, sadness and complete isolation hanging over them and the story. Lange tells her story very well, with what is not said as important as what is said.
I had another book by Lange checked out of the library a couple of years ago, but I turned it back in without ever having gotten around to reading it. Your review here–in particular your emphasis on the sense of dread and mystery evoked by Lange–is oddly appealing, so I may read this as my first book by her after all. Thanks for writing about this.