Customer Reviews

The eye of the heart;: Short stories from Latin America

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The fabulous little collection of short fiction is a msut read for people wanting to discover the passion of Latin Magic Realism genre of fiction. My personal favorite stories were YZUR by Leopoldo Lugones, The Other Death by Jorge Luis Borges and Like the NIght bt Alejo Carpentier. I first read this book in a class at California College of Arts and Crafts called Ethic Writers taught by Richard Oyama. It was an intruduction to the beginning of a love affair with Borges,Paz, Carlos Fuentes,Maria Luisa Bombal, Laura Esquival, Sandra Cisnero...and on and on

This book was published in 1973 and contained 42 pieces by 41 authors, from 13 nations and Puerto Rico. The selections, almost all of them short stories, ranged from the 1880s (Machado de Assis and Ruben Dario) through each decade to 1970 (Roa Bastos), with coverage heaviest for the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Cuba were the most frequently represented countries. For Argentina, with the most authors, the choices were Lugones, Güiraldes, Borges, Arlt, Cortázar, Bioy Casares and Costantini.

The youngest authors were Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Edwards of Chile and Mario Vargas Llosa, born in the late 1920s/mid-1930s. The female authors included were Mistral, Bombal, Silveira de Queiroz, Lispector and Somers. Other of the well-known writers included Guimarăes Rosa, Onetti, Amado, Rulfo, Donoso, García Márquez and Cabrera Infante.

For me, the distinctive things about this book were the care it took in selecting for the most part stories that were relatively easy to follow and enjoy, and its inclusion of writers who don't often appear in subsequent anthologies, such as Gallegos, Güiraldes, Arlt, Arguedas, Bosch, Arreola and Roa Bastos. Unlike, say, the Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature published in the same decade, the present book for the most part avoided fragmented, baroque writing, except in the selections for Asturias and Carpentier. In addition, several of the region's best-known poets were included (Darío, Mistral, Vallejo, Neruda, Paz), though with prose selections, not poetry. Neruda's contained reminiscences of his childhood, interest in nature and reading.

My favorites were some of the older stories: Gallegos' "The Devil's Twilight" (1919), which described starkly a character who played a devil in a town's parades and what happened to him. Arlt's "One Sunday Afternoon" (1933), in which two marginal characters in Buenos Aires, a man and woman, spoke frankly to each other about their hopes and desires. Alfonso Reyes' "Major Aranda's Hand" (1949), about a disembodied hand that took on a life of its own, in a manner that recalled something of Gogol. And Paz's lyrical, ultimately dark "My Life with the Wave" (1949), about a man who fell in and out of love with a wave in the form of a woman:

"Love was a game, a perpetual creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence . . . . Her presence was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in the wink of an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the dryness, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping rocked in those waters, to wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew laughing.

"But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal . . . Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples . . .

"She began to miss solitude. The house was full of snails and conches, of small sailboats that in her fury she had shipwrecked . . . How many little treasures were lost in that time! But my boats and the silent song of the snails was not enough. I had to install in the house a colony of fish. I confess that it was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend, . . . sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair with light flashes of color."

I had to read some of the short stories featured in this book, and I thought it would be boring. When I started to read the first one, "The Phychiatrist" (please excuse my spelling!) I was actually laughing! This was a school assignment! I recommend this book to anyone who likes short stories in particular, and who is interested in the Latino culture.

I took this book out of my local library a while back, and I kept thinking about it. The 'frame' Jorge Amado puts around his story, "How Porciuncula the Mulatto Got the Corpse Off His Back" is great. And, Julio Cortazar's "End of The Game" is a jaw-dropper, any way you cut it. The first story, by Machado do Assis ("The Psychologist") is extremely charming, yet also extremely en pointe about human nature, and also the disastrous socio/political legacies of the 20th century. There are also many less 'big name' authors whose work I first found here, and have become attached to. "Tarciso," by Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, for instance, has an eerie, affecting quality. "The Piano," by Anibal Monteiro Machado, has beautiful images and passages. "The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian," by Juan Bosch, was thoughtful and amusing and intriguing. In the end, I have remembered and enjoyed so many of the works in this book, that I think the editor demonstrated a real gift for spotting/selecting works that were strong and would work well in an anthology.