Mara L. Garcia, PhD

Brigham Young University

Rhina Toruño.  Encounter With Memory: Elena Garro Recounts Her Story To Rhina Toruño.  Prueba de Galera Ediciones: Buenos Aires, 2004.  120 pp.

Memory is without a doubt an essential aspect that the creative investigator Rhina Toruño wrote in her book, Encounter with Memory…, which resulted in a recollection of events to rebuild a puzzle left by Elena Garro.  The valuable information that the book delivers emerged from many intense and enriching conversations between Elena Garro and the critic, Rhina Toruño, in which Garro tells unedited intimate details and surprising events of her life.  Rhina Toruño, a recognized specialist in the work of Garro, presents to us a book about the life of the most significant woman writer of the twentieth century. Toruño gathers and updates information, obtained from interviews by telephone and in person, that had been kept from or out of reach of the critics.

            Encounter with Memory…is divided into two sections.  In the first section, almost 57 pages of text are dedicated to the author of Los recuerdos del porvenir (Recollections of the Things to Come) from her birth and then passing through her childhood and adolescence.  The reader learns about the birth of her daughter and the marital vicissitudes that she experienced.  The dialog between the author and the investigator extends to the diplomatic trips of Garro and her husband. Garro doesn’t hide anything, openly chatting about her affair with the writer, Bioy Casares, that lasted 20 years, her divorce from Octavio Paz, and her self-exile in 1972, among other things.  In this first section, Garro strips her inner-self and evokes her memory to share with the critic: “to clear up things” or “so that the world will know the truth,” she adds.  The last conversation that Toruño had with Elena Garro was on April 24, 1998, five days after the death of Octavio Paz.  On this date the writer was not only physically exhausted, but also morally exhausted.  This section penetrates happy and unhappy moments in which many times the reader will be surprised at how Garro very naturally expresses passages of her life and intimate moments in poetic form.  Encounter With Memory… leaves a great impression of the life of Garro and a very important element for the understanding of the works of Elena Garro, one in which real life and fiction are interweaved.

The purpose of the second part of the book, as annotated by Toruño, is to analyze some selected works of Elena Garro.  Given the space, some of the studies are brief but nonetheless valuable, since they leave evidence of the peasant author’s critique of the Mexican governmental politics.  Toruño selects some narrative works and dramas in which the feminine character is represented as marginal and victimized, except in, Y Matarazo no llamó… [And Matarazo Never Called…] (1989).  In addition it emphasizes the intimate relationship of the author to her fiction.  Garro was a strong critic of governmental politics; this philosophy is well established through her characters.  In Felipe Angeles, the author “criticizes the opportunists who at the inception of the Revolution fought for justice, but later betrayed their ideals and submitted themselves to the orders of the new dictator” (Toruño 69).  Her critique is manifested against the federal government after the Revolution in Los recuerdos del porvenir [Recollections of Things to Come] (1963).  In the short story, “La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas” [“It’s the fault of the Tlaxcaltecas”], her favorite short story and part of the book, La semana de colores [The Week of Colors](1964), she recreates the myth of the Malinche and frees her of any blame for the conquest of the Spaniards.  In And Matarazo no llamó…, her pungent critique of the government is obvious.  In addition, she attacks the press and syndicate leaders denouncing all their Mexican political corruption. 

Rhina Toruño concludes this section with the theatrical drama, Sócrates y los gatos [Socrates and the Cats] (2003), still unedited when Helena Paz sent it to Toruño on February 12, 2003.  According to Rhina Toruño’s viewpoint, this theatrical work implicitly references a historical moment lived by many in Mexico during the student massacre in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968.  This analysis is a great ending given by the investigator because it is the least known among critics.  

Encounter with Memory… corroborates what the Garro critic has established about the work of Elena Garro.  To understand the works of Elena Garro, it is important to know her life since her books are saturated with autobiographical elements.  With her pen, the writer elevated much of her life and political philosophy to an artistic and immortal level without excluding the historical moments that she lived. 

Rhina Toruño’s book is a spring of biographical information on the author, a valuable critical analysis for the studies of the works of Elena Garro and for the Hispanic American critique in general.