Novelist, essayist and playwright Julieta Campos has employed various genres with formal mastery and stylistic audacity. “Today I feel that I can reconcile myself, at last, with my split identity,” she wrote in the introduction to Reunión de familia (Family reunion) (1997), a compilation of her early narrative works and one play. Campos’s confession alludes not only to the many genres she has explored but also to the alliance she has wrought between her literary vocation and real life’s call: to better the lives and living conditions of Mexico’s poor indigenous population. In fact, the discovery of a pact between the alchemy of writing and the temptation to modify actual existence appears, in her case, to have smoothed the way for the reconciliation of these two facets of experience often considered contradictory, even adversarial. Yet there is still a third way to interpret this “reconciliation”: the Cuban-born author’s intellectual and biographical paths have led her to recognize that Mexico, her adopted home, is a definitive place in her life.
more from BOMB here.