Rain and Other Fictions Stories by Maurice Kenny (Paperback)

by Marjorie Agosin (Editor) "Throughout history, women have always been close to language..." (more)
Key Phrases: futile endeavours, Old Nanny, Young Nanny, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Introducing his five stories and a one-act play, Kenny ( The Mama Poems ) says that writing these kinds of narrative is "an exercise in ridding poetry of the statement of prose." Regrettably, this disappointing collection suggests that the exercise also strips his tales of poetry, the element that may have lifted them above the mediocre. In "And Leave The Driving to Us," a teenager rides a bus from Denverstet no state to San Jose, Calif., in search of the father he has never encountered. "Wet Moccasins" describes a man who refuses to take his wife hunting, returns empty-handed that evening, yet still has fresh rabbit--the one his wife shot in the backyard--for dinner; he eats it, one assumes, with a side dish of crow. A group of Pueblo Indians dances to bring an end to the dry spell, but the cultural and religious event yields tourists and vendors as well as "Rain." In the one-act play set in a shabby hotel room, two men who met in the El Paso bus station decide to become "Buddies," but the hotel clerk breaks up their friendship when he sics the police on them.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-- Motivated by the desire to distribute in English the writings of women who are famous in their countries but unknown elsewhere, Agosin has given readers a true gift. She has organized 22 stories into five very general groupings that include myth, fairy tale, and contemporary life. Some are so short as to almost be fragments while others are longer; all form an amazingly broad range of approach and subject matter. A translator is infuriated at having to speak for a lying politician ("The Open Letter" by Helena Araujo of Colombia); a little girl tries to understand why the adults in her life are withdrawn and distracted ("Jimena's Fair" by Laura Riesco of Peru); and mischievous children watch their mother shrink to the size of a raisin ("The Enchanted Raisin" by Jacqueline Balcells of Chile). Marta Bruent of Chile, born in 1897 and the earliest writer represented, provides a haunting and carefully constructed story about a woman's life and what she clings to for survival. Following a sudden terrible act of destruction, she considers death but chooses life. This spirit of life and vitality permeates the entire book. --Barbara Weathers, Duchesne Academy, Houston
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: White Pine Press (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0934834989
• ISBN-13: 978-0934834988
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,932,406 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile as One of the Earlier Collections in English of Women's Writing in the Region, August 2, 2008

By	Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Landscapes of A New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (Secret Weavers Series) (Paperback)

This book was published in 1989 and contained 21 short stories and 1 excerpt from a family memoir. The 21 female authors were from 10 Latin American countries. Argentina, Brazil and Chile were best represented, with 4-5 stories each, the other writers were from Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Peru and Uruguay.

The editor's intention was to present works by great writers from the region. The oldest authors included were Chile's Marta Brunet (1897-1967) and María Luisa Bombal, (1910-80), Argentina's Silvina Ocampo (1906-93), Cuba's Dora Alonso (1910-2001) and Bolivia's Yolanda Bedregal (1916-99). The youngest were Uruguay's Christina Peri Rossi (1941-), Brazil's Patricia Bins (1942-) and Chile's Jacqueline Balcells (1945-).

Others included Argentina's Luisa Valenzuela (1938-), Brazil's Clarice Lispector (1925-77), Lygia Fagundes Telles (1928-) and Nelida Piñon (1937-), Costa Rica's Carmen Naranjo (1931-) and Mexico's Elena Poniatowska (1932-).

As far as could be judged, most of the pieces were written or published between the 1960s and 80s. Almost no information was provided on years or sources for the stories.

The first half of the collection focused on personal themes like the mysteries of love and the "magical secrets and prophesies that are linked to the mythical image of women." Of the stories in this section, the ones enjoyed most were Poniatowska's "The Message" and Bedregal's "Good Evening, Agatha," for passages containing beautiful imagery or other writing, and Fagundes Telles' "The Key," in which a confused old man considered his relationship to his younger wife. Many of the others here were for me somewhat fragmented, rambling and tiresome, focusing almost entirely on poetic, minute descriptions of their narrators' emotions (Bombal, Bins, Hilst). The pieces included by Bombal and Lispector were in my opinion far from being among their best works.

In the second half of the collection were broader political and social themes considered relevant to the region, and stories with stylistic elements thought to be characteristic, which would usually be called magical realism but were described here as the irrational, insane and magical-diabolical. The editor also had a particular interest in children's literature, and included several authors who wrote in that genre, among them Chile's Jacqueline Balcells and Amalia Rendic.

The second half was for me more interesting. Of the political and social works, the one by Peru's Riesco concerned the child of a wealthy family living in the countryside who gradually became aware of problems in her society. Foreigners and their children left the area, her parents argued, a maid mentioned casually the kidnapping of other children, and the family prepared to move away. The story was overlong, but the limited understanding of a child was communicated well, as was an atmosphere of foreboding. The piece by Costa Rica's Naranjo showed a man's authoritarian behavior, in parallel with his business success and crushingn of his wife's spirit, which prepared the ground for the next generation. The tale by Colombia's Araujo took place in Geneva in the 1970s, where a letter was presented to the Colombian president protesting torture and political repression; a rare short story set outside the region and concerned with such people, though the narrative ended abruptly. The style of these works was fairly straightforward. Other stories with a political or social dimension contained elements of magical realism (Alonso, Valenzuela, Steimberg).

The magic realist elements of stories in the second half seemed mainly to be a feverish blending of reality and hallucination (Alonso, Orphée) or exaggeration/absurdity (Valenzuela, Steimberg, Ocampo, Peri Rossi, Balcells). The piece by Alonso described the life and dreams of a female monkey caged in a zoo, cataloging the many inhabitants and overwhelming sights and smells. In the work by Orphée, two bachelors became trapped in the house of two old ladies, living in rooms that held the furnishings of their dreams.

In Valenzuela's story, a lowly guard hired to protect a corporation's money became caught up in the world of plants and eventually disappeared. In the story by Steimberg, a narrator read the will of a woman in which she left various emotions, attitudes and memories to her friends, but the narrator's identity was unknown and the woman seemed to have been among those who were "disappeared" by the government. In the work by Ocampo, a devoted servant prolonged her mistress's life and caused the deaths of others who wanted the mistress to die. The story by Peri Rossi was about a museum that catalogued futile endeavors, which recalled something of the style of Borges. In the children's tale by Balcells, a mother was transformed into a raisin by the bickering of her children, but things turned out well in the end.

The story by Fagundes Telles was written from an old man's point of view and shifted among several points in time, past and present. Araujo's work likewise shifted between past and present, from a woman's perspective. Other than these two, the works avoided complicated shifts in time or point of view such as those found in writers like Asturias, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Rulfo, Donoso, Sarduy or Arenas. Nor were there metaphysically intricate constructions like those of Borges or Cortázar.

As with other collections of this type, there was a lack of stories that dealt realistically with relationships between two adults presented as equals or women doing something relatively mundane like working in an office.

This book was one of the earlier collections in English of writing by female authors from the region, and some beautiful stories and passages of writing can be found in it. It introduced me to younger writers I didn't know and to unknown stories by some of the older writers. Readers looking for a greater range of writing with a smaller number of fragmented, rambling stories might particularly enjoy Short Stories by LA Women: The Magic and the Real (1990). Other collections include Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1986), Out of the Mirrored Garden (1995) and Cruel Fictions, Cruel Realities: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers (1997).

Some excerpts:

From Poniatowska's "The Message": "I know that all women wait. They wait for future life, for all those images forged in solitude, for all that forest that moves toward them; for all that immense promise that is a man; a pomegranate that suddenly is opened and shows its shining red seeds; a pomegranate like a ripe mouth with a thousand sections. Later those hours lived through imagination, made into real hours, will have to take on weight and size and rawness. Oh, my love, we are so full of interior portraits, so full of unlived landscapes."

From Bedregal's "Good Evening, Agatha": "As with all men, has he any idea of what he is or what he wants? The years have fused onto him a mask of frustrated minutes, society has imposed on him a facade and treacherous attitudes; the authorities have added on papers in his pockets, tags on his lapel. If he did not need documents to identify him, he would be unmistakable. The possession of a passport, a document of identification, rental receipts, tax vouchers, a wallet, keys, makes everyone the same, even though the police maintain the contrary."

From Alonso's "Cage Number One": "The great prison breathed in the night, liberating its vegetable dreams, the tortured nightmares of free rivers and rapid deaths, the fever of sterile encounters, the castrated anger of confinement . . . . The monkey was delirious, dreaming she was biting the good keeper on the throat until she could feel her lips near his flowing arteries; she strangled him with the shoelaces that he had taught her to tie and untie. She dreamed she was fleeing to the forest followed by all the simians deformed in exhibitions."

From Araujo's "The Open Letter": "Strangely, when the President began to speak, it seemed to Elvira that he was not expressing himself of his own initiative, but rather that he was controlled by some other force, as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy. You could say that someone, far away, was dictating those slow, hesitant sentences, someone who also controlled the movement of those hands, kept the cheeks of that face inflated, and maintained the posture of that flaccid body. It was true: his voice seemed guided by remote control."

From Peri Rossi's "The Museum of Futile Endeavors": "The clerk assures me that only a minuscule part of the futile endeavours ever reaches the museum . . . . Entire sections of the museum are dedicated to [travelers'] journeys. After wandering for some time across diverse seas, traversing dark forests, visiting cities and markets, crossing bridges, sleeping on trains or on benches at the station, they forget the purpose of their journey and nevertheless they keep on traveling. One day they disappear without a trace or a memory, swept away in a flood, trapped in a tunnel or asleep forever in a doorway. No one claims them."