People in the Room is a story of a teenage girl who spies out her window at three older women across from her home one night. She quickly becomes obsessed with the neighbors and their activities as she watches them night-after-night. Readers will get lost in a shadowy world where they will find themselves unsure if the three older women are real or if the young girl is imagining them.
Lange explorers how we invent the lives of others. She unmasks how we look at other’s live from the outside, filling in the gaps of what we don’t know about their stories and essentially making assumptions, good or bad, to explain their behavior to ourselves.
About The Book
A young woman in Buenos Aires spies three women in the house across the street from her family’s home. Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences. Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.
About The Author
Norah Lange was an Argentine author, associated with the Buenos Aires avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s. A member of the Florida group, which also included figures such as Oliverio Girondo and Jorge Luis Borges, she published in the “ultraist” magazines Prisma, Proa, and Martín Fierro.
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Article originally Published in the October/November 2019 Issue “Read Global”