The Shrouded Woman is a book centered on the perspective of a recently deceased, shrouded woman who has not yet been buried, and depicts the spiritual conversations, memories, and inquiries or questions that arise between this woman, lying on her hearse, and those who come to offer their condolences. Leaving the novel behind and entering the imagination, when a person dies but his soul is still in the world, we often say that this person must have some unfulfilled wishes or obsessions, and generally speaking, probably not some very good memories.

In this book, the author utilizes many ways of narrating with the perspective constantly shifting. We can think of these perspectives as lenses, the first of which can be described as a bystander’s perspective, or “God’s perspective”, which presents the reader with an overall view of the dead woman and the people who have come to offer their condolences. The second perspective is that of the dead woman, who looks at the mourners from her point of view, especially those who have hurt her, in order to engage in some dialog and ask questions. The third point of view is that of the mourners, who express what they want to say to the woman from their point of view. These memories build up the woman’s life, from her girlhood, with her companions, her sisters, her first love, to her marriage, with its wreckage and loathing of her husband, and her admirers, to her children, and finally to her death. In this recollection, the three perspectives shift back and forth.

It is her husband who gets the most ink in this book. When she was newly married, her husband was very nice to the woman, but the woman was a little resistant to the marriage, so after a while the woman got angry and ran back to her mother’s house, but when the woman went back to her mother’s house for a while, she realized that life wasn’t what she had imagined it would be like, and she was looking forward to her husband picking her up and hoping to have a good life with her husband again. But when she waited for her husband with joy, she was greeted by his cold words, and even she later realized that the tenderness of the newlyweds was pretended by her husband, and thus, hatred was born out of love. In this description, a woman’s physical and psychological thirst for her husband is depicted, and there are also some descriptions of sex, which may also be an important breakthrough in Latin American literature.

My question is: in this book, there are a lot of perspective shifting, did you read some other novels with perspective shifting?