One Out of Two
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A literary titan of his time, one of the most innovative novelists in contemporary Latin American letters." -The Washington Post
The most distinctive thing about the Gamal sisters is that they are, essentially, indistinguishable (except for a modest mole). The twin spinsters spend their time trying to mask any perceptible differences they have while working hard at their thriving tailoring business in a small town in rural northern Mexico. When? Thirty years ago? Fifty years ago? Who can say-the world seems not to intrude on Ocampo very much.
Gloria and Constitution take an almost perverse delight in confusing people about which one is which. But then a suitor enters the picture, and one of the sisters decides that she doesn't want to live a life without romance and all the good things that come with it. The ensuing competition between the sisters brings their relationship to the breaking point until they come up with an ingenious solution that carries this buoyant farce to its tender and even liberating conclusion.
Suffused with the tension between our desire for union and our desire for independence, Daniel Sada's One Out of Two is a giddy and comic fable by one of the giants of contemporary Latin American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Mexican writer Sada is beginning to seep into translation, and if One out of Two is any indication, English-language readers have much to look forward to. The Gamal twins, Gloria and Constituci n, are identical in almost every way: both seamstresses, both unmarried in their 40s, both mad. Orphaned and alone in the world but for each other and a kindly though meddling aunt, they live in relative isolation in the rural Ocampo, until a wedding invitation threatens their perfect equilibrium. There, Constituci n meets a suitor, the dashing Oscar Segura. Dedicated to sharing everything, the sisters decide to pose as one person and take turns romancing Oscar. But there are desires neither sister can fully admit, and so they enter into a series of surprising negotiations and deceptions in order to preserve their ideal union, even after Oscar proposes marriage and forces Gloria and Constituci n to acknowledge that perhaps "the number two can never be one." This short novel is a tragedy, but Sada writes with genuine amusement and a conversational ease, relating the sisters' secret jealousy with a puckish eloquence ("She imagined the shindig, the enveloping music, and her sister sitting on a chair, alone, silent, a woodpecker perched on a branch, a toy bird, poised and waiting for a polite man of reasonable height to ask her to dance"). In the end, we come to see Gloria and Constituci n's dotty project as no different from any family's shifting layers of compromise, self-delusion, and love.
