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A New World Symphony in Fiction
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20171 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,545 Words |
| Author
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Lauren Weiner
Lauren Weiner covered Latin American affairs as a reporter for
the Washington Times for two years. Her articles and reviews
have appeared in the New Criterion, the National Interest,
Commentary, the Detroit News, and other publications. |
A HAMMOCK BENEATH THE MANGOES
Stories from Latin America
Thomas Colchie
New York: Dutton, 1991
430 pp., $21.95
This rich anthology of short stories has been packaged to fit the peculiar image that Latin American fiction has attained north of the border. Its title is taken from a languid line from the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade that also serves as the epigraph: "A hammock beneath two mangoes swayed in the dreaming world." The book's dust jacket touts the "magic" of Latin America's literary masters, an allusion to the well-worn tag of "magic realism" that South American writers have come to dread as a cliché.
It is true that several of the twenty-six stories collected here describe characters who are either fast asleep, trying to fall asleep, or in some fashion operating in a no man's land between the real and the imagined. And, to be sure, many of the tales are told with a rambunctious inventiveness that leaves the mundane and the literal far behind. However, at this late date, one has to ask if "magic realism" is truly a regional specialty or just a marketing ploy to get people in the United States to shell out $21.95.
Not that I would discourage them from doing so in this case. But once readers have sampled some of the stories in this book they may wonder, is Murilo Rubio's "Ex-Magician from the Minhota Tavern" any more fanciful than, say, Nikolai Gogol's "Nose," or Marcel Ayme's "Passer-Through-Walls"? Are Alejo Carpentier's superb tricks of chronology in "Journey Back to the Source" radically different from those advocated by the surrealists whom Carpentier knew in Paris between the wars? Does Isabel Allende's "Toad's Mouth" issue from a drowsier literary sensibility than that which produced Truman Capote's similar tale, "House of Flowers"?
To be fair, editor Thomas Colchie, in his elegant and perspicacious introduction, challenges the notion that there is a single and distinct Latin American method of representing life in fiction. He quotes the impatient comment of Jorge Amado, who said, "we are united simply by what is negative--misery, oppression, military dictatorship."
The tendency of tyrants to mistreat authors does unify the region in a way that literary catchphrases cannot. Colchi points to the brutal habits of
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