By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Sep 28 2004 (IPS)

Marcela Serrano, one of Chile’s most successful contemporary women writers – and one of the most unpopular with critics as well – is back at the top of bestseller lists in the Spanish-speaking world with her new novel, Hasta siempre, mujercitas (See You, Little Women).

As its title suggests, the book is essentially a take-off on the classic U.S. novel ‘Little Women’, written by Louisa May Alcott in 1869. Or perhaps, more than a take-off, a 20th-century adaptation, set in Chile during the military coup of Sep. 11, 1973.

In keeping with Alcott’s original work, the four main characters in Serrano’s new novel are four girls, in this case, Nieves, Ada, Lola and Luz. They also bring to mind another quartet of female characters, the four women in Serrano’s first novel, Nosotras, que nos queremos tanto (We Love Each Other So Much), published in 1991.

"I have no doubt that the motivation behind my first book was related to Alcott’s Little Women. It’s just that I didn’t really face it head on," Serrano recently commented in an interview with the Santiago newspaper La Nación.

The four women in Nosotras, Que Nos Queremos Tanto, however, "came from very different worlds," and were brought together as adults through their work.

For her new novel, Serrano looked directly to the original for inspiration. "I wanted the common roots, the blood ties, I wanted the shared childhood," she said.

Once the four Chilean "little women" grow up, however, they take very different paths in life, each reacting in her own way to the coup d’état that toppled democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende and to the ensuing military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The theme of exile is a predominant one here, as in so much of Chilean literature from the past 30 years.

When Serrano, who was born in 1951, reached her 40s, she joined Isabel Allende (author of The House of the Spirits, among other bestsellers) as one of Chile’s most internationally renowned women writers.

She has since gone on to pen a number of commercially successful novels, such as Para que no me olvides (So You Won’t Forget Me), El albergue de las mujeres tristes (Refuge of Sad Women), Un mundo raro (A Strange World), Nuestra señora de la soledad (Our Lady of Solitude), and Lo que está en mi corazón (What Lies in My Heart), awarded second place in the 2001 Planeta publishing house competition.

True to her openly feminist beliefs, Serrano donated the 120,000 dollars in prize money for the building of a shelter for battered women.

She is also faithful to her leftist ideals. "I am a socialist and I will continue to be a leftist, no matter what anyone else says. For me, being a leftist implies a certain sensitivity, and today we are aspiring to a society that is geared more to equity than to equality," she told La Nación.

"I don’t need a cold war to know who the good guys and who the bad guys are," she said, adding that for her, to be a leftist means taking "a stance on the side of life" and "humanism that will make us all happier."

The daughter of writer and essayist Horacio Serrano and author Elisa Pérez – who used the pen name Elisa Serrano to publish some of the first feminist works in Chile – Marcela is one of four sisters, just like the main characters in both Little Women and her own See You, Little Women.

Married at 22, she and her husband went into exile in Italy after the 1973 coup. She later divorced and returned to Chile, where she married again. After that marriage ended, she met lawyer and political leader Luis Maira. They now have two daughters.

Her commercial success, like that of Isabel Allende, has made some critics sceptical. She has been accused of superficiality and of resorting to the "stock formula" of a love story set against the backdrop of the coup in Chile, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and other political struggles.

"It doesn’t bother me anymore. I think my attitude has changed, even if the attitudes around me haven’t," she commented.

"I look at the critical reviews with a bit more indulgence now, and I say to myself, God, it’s so hard for women to do things! Really! You don’t even have the right to have readers, because if you do, then it means that your readers are idiots, and you’re an idiot, too."

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