Description

Two nuns, and one obsessed mother, doing everything in their power to achieve communion with the one they love.

Sister Lugarda de la Encarnacion takes the lash, and an unnamed mother gets down on her hands and knees – sacramental postures demanded by inscrutable men. Apparitions is a novel of ecstasy pursued, desire transmogrified into devotion, and obedience as a passionately pursued, not entirely free choice. Erotic, and suffused with painting, music, art, it’s an incantatory exploration of what it means to abandon the world, and to use your body – in pain, and in pleasure – as a way of finally coming to know the divine.

Publisher Review

"Glantz's writing is raw and vulnerable, much like the women she writes about. This complex portrait of all-consuming desire is tough to shake." -Publishers Weekly "Apparitions is short, complex, unusual and abounding in breathtaking descriptions: reading it exposes us to an almost mortal risk." -Monica Mansour "Margo Glantz has constructed a powerful and ambiguous novel." -Rocio Silva-Santisteban "I believe that with this book Glantz has renewed the genre (...). She has recovered the pristine nakedness of the body and the energy of its most secret drives." -Augusto Roa Bastos , author of I THE SUPREME "A bold and unclassifiable novel that combines audacity with a traditional vision of relationships, not only sexual, between men and women, involving both the mystical tradition and the author's interest in the figure of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz." -Publishers Weekly "Glantz writes about and from the body, exploring through words the limits of meaning to make literature the deepest of joys." -El Mundo "Margo Glantz uses the model of the erotic novel to subvert it with an existential component, and dialogues across time with Pasolini, Kawabata and Bataille." -infoLibre "Inspired by the erotic tradition of mysticism, Margo Glantz explores the limits of the female body; between the dark and the profane, the beautiful and the disturbing (...) The novel (...) is always accompanied by music, which turns the writing into a marvellous score." -La Vanguardia "An icon in Latin American literature and feminism, few things seem to hold back the Mexican writer Margo Glantz. " -El Espanol