About
Author: Daniel Sada (Mexico)
Genre: Domestic Fiction
Setting
Place: Mexico
Time: 1970-80s
My Rating (see what this means)
My Subjective Rating: 2
My ‘Objective’ Rating: 1.58
Introduction
‘One Out of Two, or Two in One’ is how Daniel Sada describes the Gamal sisters for it was impossible to physically tell them apart. Moreover, Gloria and Constitución Gamal built their spinster existence eliminating every non-physical differences they might have once had.
Now over forty, their neat predictable life is disrupted at a prospect of love ‘with a slender man of interesting age’ and each, for the first time, starts to imagine life without the other!
Review
“…because individualism, which is nothing but amorphous vanity, can sometimes gain momentum..”
It was a fateful coin toss about who gets to go to a wedding (with potential suitors around) that triggered the isolated thoughts of individualism into the mind of each of the Gamal sisters. They both approach it hesitantly – often dismissing these thoughts, only for the winner to jump right back to revel thinking about the, till then, taboo possibilities of life, while the loser revelled in her righteous fury against her luck. The novel shines its brightest during these moments of isolated meditations.
When the suitor (Oscar of an interesting age) comes along however, the sisters are unable to act upon their individualist excogitations – and they fall back to joint solutioning for a situation that doesn’t warrant such solutions. Poor Oscar suffers the consequences.
Picture Credits:
- https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/workplace-of-seamstress-on-white-background-vector-9974251