Margo Glantz decided to write an impossible book: a mystic novel and an erotic novel at the same time. In Apparitions, a shadowy narrator invites us to become both voyeurs of the erotic rituals of a romantic couple and spies of the mortification of two tormented nuns. As if she were playing, the narrator, who’s enamored with the act of writing, shows and conceals her characters, speeds up the narrative and then, suddenly, slows it down, or she starts building a scene and then abruptly closes it to take us to a whole other world, one where there are no longer two lovers having sex, but two nuns whipping one another.

This is one of Glantz’s riskiest novels. It can be described as a successful attempt to write down two indescribable acts from the point of view of a female narrator who, as she writes about her three protagonists, subtly and elegantly portrays some of the intricate manifestations of female desire.