Piano Stories (The Eridanos Library) [Paperback]

Felisberto Hernandez (Author), Luis Harss (Translator)

Book Description

Series: The Eridanos Library | Publication Date: May 1993

stories, Uruguay, tr L Harss, afterword Cortazar

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Uruguayan fabulist Hernandez (1902-1964) influenced Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others, but the appeal of these fey tales that introduce him to an English-speaking audience and that recount the adventures of a poor pianist may elude the casual reader. For Hernandez, inanimate objects have a will and conscience of their own. About a red pencil used by his music teacher, the narrator exclaims, "like a piglet suckling in quick, short bursts, it would cling hungrily to the white of the page, leaving little sharp footprints with its short black hoof and merrily wagging its long red tail." In another story, the narrator plays the piano for an agoraphobic who believes that her balcony has a soul and that, jealous over the attention she pays to the narrator, the balcony has jumped from the building. Other strange doings involve a promotional scheme for a furniture store whereby promoters inject would-be customers with a serum that sensitizes them to special advertising broadcasts, and a woman who dresses up a doll that resembles her in her own clothing and whose husband eventually falls in love with the doll. Hernandez's imagination is extremely fertile, but his prose, at least in this translation, is baggy and he tends to trot out intriguing but ultimately meaningless phrases: "She leaned her bare arms on the panes as if she were resting them on someone's breast."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Hern ndez (1902-64) was a Uruguayan fabulist whose form was the bagatelle. Here, in a first English translation of his work, the improbable, the ridiculous, the non-computing all feed his little stories--admired by such more major talents as Garc¡a M rquez and Calvino (who contributes an introduction here). In 12 tales plus novella, there are lifelike dolls, hallways full of open parasols, a woman whose ``best friend'' is her balcony. Homely details not even close to central pull the rest of the narration toward them, come what may: ``When I was the one insinuating passionate desires--with words, now; clumsy words coming out to be heard like grotesquely shy men stepping out to dance for the first time--it was her nose that seemed to be listening and--since her eyes were almost shut--even looking at me. And when she leaned out the window to see what was going on in the street, it seemed her nose was waiting for the opera glasses that would slowly settle on it.'' But all the goofy knocks-akilter, inversions, doublings, and elongations aside, Hern ndez's work has a preciousness and aestheticism that make it mostly a curiosity. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Marsilio Pub (May 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0941419541
• ISBN-13: 978-0941419543
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #968,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Piano Stories, April 9, 2004

By 

Vladimir Miskovic - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piano Stories (The Eridanos Library) (Paperback)

The oddness of Felisberto Hernandez, the man, may perhaps eclipse the essential weirdness of his fictions. There is somewhat of a mystery surrounding him: he was a pianist who used to work accompanying silent movies. He traveled extensively, performing concerts. He took up writing somewhat later in life, remained more or less anonymous up to his death. Today, he is hardly known outside of Latin American literature and yet has inspired the so-called `magical realism' literary movement, made popular in the works of the Nobel-prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Piano Stories, so named by the publishers because nearly every single story incorporates a piano, is the first collection of Felisberto's work translated into English. It is meant to serve as a representative exhibition of the writer's career. It features fifteen pieces, two of them being short novellas (`The Stray Horse' and `The Daisy Dolls') and some others no more than a page and a half long. The introduction is penned by Italo Calvino - another major writer who was apparently influenced by Hernandez.

The adjectives befitting the overall `feel' of the Piano Stories would be: elegant, absurd, surreal and otherworldly. There are repeated motifs of the nature of memory, as explored in the story `Just Before Falling Asleep' and `The Green Heart', and more extensively in `The Stray Horse' where the narrator is aware of an impending attempt to distort a series of childhood memories, for if a person were capable of changing his memories, as one changes stage settings, would that not result in a different person inhabiting the present? In `The Flooded House' a widow has decided that water has the inherent quality required for nurturing memory: "water is the place to grow memories, because it transforms everything reflected in it and it's receptive to thought." (Hernandez, P.246)

In these short stories, inanimate objects acquire a life of their own when viewed in certain light - furniture is able to reveal secrets about a person and in the eerie novella, `The Daisy Dolls', a man has an affair with a life-like replica doll of his wife.
Eccentric characters abound: in `The Balcony' the reader makes the acquaintance of an agoraphobic who believes that individual parts of her house have a soul. In `The Usher' the narrator, having grown accustomed to dark surroundings, acquires a persistent glow in his eyes.

Many of the stories proceed as hypnagogic trances, surreal romps through exotic surroundings. The writing style is average on the whole: a few genuine lyrical waves are balanced out by a number of slumps now and then, owing perhaps to the work's translation from Spanish. There are instances when the reader feels as if Hernandez does not quite know how to express clearly the ideas he has or to fully develop a consistent flow, as in `The Two Stories' or the unbearable `The Woman Who Looked Like Me'.
This collection of stylish pieces is enjoyable for its atmospheric engagement but in the end, looking behind the screen, the reader may come out empty-handed.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For those with an imagination..., March 30, 2000

By 

"squidhorse" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piano Stories (The Eridanos Library) (Paperback)

Felisberto Hernendez' Piano Stories is a rare book indeed. His stories were the precursors of what is now called "magic realsim" (the style of writers such as Garcia-Marquez and Jeanette Winterson), but his tales are truly unique. They are concered with the haunting mysteries of life, and have a dreamy, otherworldly quality which draws you inextricably into them. A cast of eccentric characters and off-the-wall occurrences will keep you on your toes. I kept putting off reading the last story in the book, because I didn't want the fun to be over.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deslumbrante, January 4, 2000

By 

Lucio Sessa (Fisciano, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Piano Stories (The Eridanos Library) (Paperback)

Un autor particular, extraordinario, que te hace sentir todo el sabor (y la complicadez) de lo que te cuenta. Cuenta cosas que parecen complicadas. Lo son para describirlas, pero todos las hemos vivido. Y cuenta tan bien, en las entrnhas de las cosas, que cuando lo leas casi te sientes mal