Hmm… I have lots of thoughts on this novel but am not sure exactly where to start. I think it’s safe to say that this piece touches on a question we’ve all spent some time thinking about: where do we go when we die? I’ll be honest, when I read the description of The Shrouded Woman, I thought it sounded a little cliché and potentially not all that interesting. Let’s face it, this is a topic that has been a little overdone in many forms of media. I’m not going to name specific examples, but there’s definitely a number of TV show, movies, and books that all touch on this question with their own, often tacky twist on it.

Bombal’s novel, in my opinion, avoids these tasteless aspects and instead offers an insightful glimpse into life after death. Her carefully woven, heart-wrenching recounting of the narrator’s life makes it hard to look away or feel like she’s using death as some kind of novelty to pull readers in. What I liked about this novel was how it felt truly real and raw in the way that it portrayed love. There are many quotable lines that I could cite here, but I particularly liked one on page 247: “how difficult it is to love as one should”. I mean, yeah. Bombal really demonstrates how complex and confusing loving someone can be, and how it never quite happens the way you expect it to.

Also, I now realize the title of my blog may have been a little misleading, but I do want to touch on Fernando briefly, simply because his character amused me. There are a few moments in this novel that I find ridiculous in an over the top kind of way, and Fernando is one of these. I just find it morbidly funny that while every other character is, to some degree, dancing around their true feelings and keeping secrets, Fernando is out here confessing that he wasn’t bothered in the slightest by his wife’s suicide and didn’t even visit her grave. He expresses his love for Ana Maria in such a bold, explicit manner, even as she rejects him, which I have to respect him a little for. Maybe we could learn something from him (but probably not, he’s got his own issues).

This novel managed to be simultaneously off-putting, in its vivid descriptions of a dead body looking at out the world and its intense emotional moments, yet also comforting, in the closure (if you could call it that) that is ultimately found in the face of death. The narrator doesn’t necessarily have some profound final realization, but she does come to view the people and events of her life with renewed clarity, and perhaps is able to understand them each a little better in her passing. Maybe there are some things which only make sense in death, which is perhaps a naive thought, but a comforting one nonetheless.

My question- did you like the way Bombal described the world from a dead woman’s perspective and did it make you at all uncomfortable?