Books by Sylvia Molloy

¿Cómo mantener una amistad intacta cuando el Alzheimer se va llevando consigo las bases del lenguaje, la memoria y las experiencias compartidas?How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?

In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too-M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend. This loss holds Molloy's sense of herself too-the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend's memory does. But the writer remains: 'I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

Regarded by many as one of the best critical books on Borges.

This is a study of Spanish American autobiography from its beginnings in the post-colonial nineteenth century to the present day. Spanish American autobiographies are shown to be fascinating hybrids, aspiring to documentary status while unabashedly exalting the self, and dwelling on personal experience while purporting to be exercises in historiography.