Customer Reviews

The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar (Jewish Latin America Series)

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This book collects The Carnival of Animals, The Ballad of the False Messiah and The Enigmatic Eye which all are out of print in their English editions with The Tremulous Dwarf, the Dwarf in the Television Set and Van Gogh's Ear which have not to my knowledge been previously available in English. The fact that I would award Moacyr Scliar a Nobel Prize for literature in itself explains why 400 pages of his short stories is just right.

Scliar is a versatile author - Jewish and Brazilean - with a breadth of knowledge of history, medicine, psychology, anthropology and Hebrew scripture that both root his stories in the concrete and give them a universal understanding. He is comfortable in allegory, fantasy, magical realism.

All the traits of his better known novels - The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes and Centaur in the Garden - are here in minature.

Given my interests, I particularly enjoyed the retelling of the ten plagues of Egypt from the perspective not of the Hebrews but of the Egyptians. However, were I to list all my favorites and explain why I'd exceed the Amazon word limit!

If you aren't up to this thick volume, read Centaur in the Garden ... then you'll want 400 pages more of his masterful writing.

In this superb anthology of six of his short story collections, Moacyr Scliar presents readers with a panoply of themes, such as persecution, exploitation, and how ideologies mold our lives. Many of these themes reflect the times during which Scliar wrote -- a time when literary and other forms of cultural expresson were being surpressed under Brazil's military regime. In the first collection of stories, "The Carnival of Animals," Scliar uses allegory to explore the theme of persecution and exploitation, amongst other things.In his story, "The Cow," Scliar writes of a sailor who, shipwrecked with only a cow for company, comes to rely on that cow for his very survival. Like the loving, maternal tree in the classic, "The Giving Tree," the cow, named Carola, provides the sailor with food, clothing, fuel -- everything.The sailor readily exploits the cow --and ultimately destroys her to save his own life. But though he survives and prospers, the sailor lives a sad, empty life. Thus we are given a brief, anecdotal allegory of how exploitation dooms both the victim and the exploiter. Scliar, a Jew, also writes of Jewish themes, some of which are included in this collection. For example, The Ballad of the False Messiah is an allegory about the Jewish quest for redemption vis a vis a messiah -- and the ultimate futility of that quest. Casting the notorious, historical "false messiah," Shabtai Zvi, as one of his main characters,Scliar uses humor and irony to develop the theme that candidates for the Jewish messiah may come and go, but the Jewish people, with a messiah or without, will prevail. In "The Plagues" readers have an opportunity to see how "the other side fared" during biblical times when God smote the Egyptians with 10 plagues. Here we read of the tribulations of an average, Egyptian family that is arbitrarily being punished for the stubborness of the Pharaoh not to "let the Hebrews go." Again we have allegory, irony, and a true literary gem. Scliar uses biblical parables and elements of that particularly Latin American genre, magical realism, to entertain,enthrall, and enlighten. A wonderful anthology.