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by Felisberto Hernández

One reads Hernández’ stories feeling as if drifting through fluid, phantasmagorical trance, animistic worlds where everyday objects take a life of their own, eliciting delicate forgotten responses, thoughts, feelings and memories. There are fifteen stories in this book, three of which are slightly longer pieces (The Stray Horse, The Daisy Dolls, The Flooded House), all of them inevitably in one way or another relate to a piano.

The dominant feature of the stories is the thick, pervading association of ideas evoking disquieting, sometimes grotesque, sensations: a jealous balcony threatened a girl with a spider, a man growing lights in his eyes, able to see in the dark, an ostrich in a cafe that always returns what it swallows, lifelike dolls filled with warm water to invoke the warmth of flesh stabbed provoking connubial jealousy, a house flooded to nurture memories. Surrealistic, definitely, but it would be wrong to consider the stories as arbitrary mish-mash of disjointed ideas. Despite the seemingly random juxtapositions, there is precise, incisive qualities in his stories that provoke sharp, cutting imageries.

Unfortunately, the translation is a bit patchy at times, with some minor translation/grammar mistakes (“he took an immediately liking to a negress”). Hernández, relatively unknown in the age of “magic realism” bombast, has been noted by the genre’s forefront runners: Cortazar, Marquez and Calvino acknowledged his great influence on their works. Indeed, Calvino, whose essays I am indebted to for the introduction to Hernández (and another great yet little known author, Bruno Schulz) penned the introduction to this collection (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli).

Much, much thanks to Shun for giving me this book.

Tags:fiction, Latin America, magic-realism, short stories
fiction, Hernández, Felisberto, Latin America, Recommended, short stories

April 18, 2007 @ 9:49 pm