Iphigenia

Here in its first English translation, this accomplished 1924 novel by de la Parra, a Venezuelan, follows Maria Eugenia Alonso as she makes the rocky transition from her youth in fashionable France to adulthood in Venezuela, where women's existence is circumscribed by propriety and financial dependence. After her father's death, she returns to her native Caracas to live with her grandmother and maiden aunt. Since she is poor (her inheritance stolen by an uncle), her grandmother is determined to barter her beauty and respectability for a desirable marriage. In the privacy of her room, with its barred window, Maria Eugenia writes of her friendship with a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage; her own ill-fated love (her suitor ultimately marries for money and advancement); her participation in an old-fashioned courtship ritual in which a marriageable woman sits in the window of her home like ``luxury items that are exhibited . . . to tempt shoppers''; and her engagement to an insensitive and narcissistic man. In the process, Maria Eugenia's own youthful vanity and frivolity are crushed by a culture that sacrifices its women to the greater glory and comfort of its men. (Mar.)