Maria Luisa Bombal. A Final Mist

I like A Final Mist very much. The narrator, emotionally distant from her husband Daniel from the outset but passive, internalizing her desperation contrasts with Regina, who carries on a passionate affair and eventually shoots herself in her lover’s house. I like that the novel depicts the female characters sympathetically yet shows both partners in the marriage suffering in and contributing to the emotional distance. The overall impact is of a terrible unbridgeable isolation – not the fault of the individuals but perhaps of the institution of marriage. At the end of the novel, after they visit Regina in the hospital, Bombal’s narrator throws herself under a vehicle, but Daniel rescues her. He “pretends ignorance of my suffering” (p. 47) as she did of his suffering on the night of their arrival at his house. She will “live correctly” “cry from habit and smile out of duty” and the narration concludes with “The fog settles over everything like a shroud.” (p. 47).

The novel proceeds via scenes heavy with thematic motifs – many of them nature related - of forest, leaves, trees, the pool, mist and fog, gardens, death, others of perception - sounds and silence, difficulty seeing, blindness, and the dream life.
The viewing of a dead girl early on in the story has no real narrative context, hence, juxtaposed to the narrator beginning her marriage with Daniel, seems to allude to Daniel’s dead wife and to the narrator’s fate (“she appears never to have been alive” p. 6).

It is ambiguous whether the narrator really left the house at night and met a lover, or whether, as Daniel claims, they both fell deeply asleep from the wine (and perhaps made love imagining that the other was someone else). I think, however, that the novel presents the meeting with the lover as real, but because of the circumstances uncertain, and hence even more inaccessible to the main character.

I see several echoes of Tolstoy in the novel and like how Bombal explores the female character’s perspective on the echoes; Regina’s piano playing awakens the pain of isolation and absence of passion in the narrator (not passion in her lover or jealousy in her husband), something that Bombal presents as a vital part of being alive; the scene where the narrator mistakes a boy practicing violin for the moan of her lover may also echo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer sonata. And “What more repugnant and useless gesture than the suicide of a woman approaching old age” (p. 46) after “the act of throwing oneself under the wheels of a vehicle” and echo of Anna Karenina.