Synopsis:
A book of stories by the Mexican writer Jesus Gardea. The stories are part of a sophisticated literature that, in its swiftness and anecdote, runs counter to prevalent literary trends. The stories are marked by repeating elements - a room, a window. Outside, the great exhausting sun, inside, souls, more than characters. They live in an existential world in which the cruelties of chance are the condition of life. Often pursuing absurd activities - moving an unclaimed dresser in a rowboat, clearing a patch of land that nobody wants - they could take as their motto Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." The atmosphere is intimate and strange, swirling, violent. The language is characterized by short, blunt phrases. There is vengeance in almost every case. On finishing Jesus Gardea's stories, one is often unsure exactly what has taken place, or if it occurred in a psychic or physical realm. Gardea's early stories have something in common with Faulkner, Rulfo, Onetti, later stories move away on a path reminiscent of Goya, Kafka, or Bacon, and in his most recent stories, the author enters a strange world that is uniquely his own, that draws nourishment from the arid landscape and cloistered life of northern Mexico, and also from a metaphysical strain that develops in his work. Without question, this ample collection of the author's work encapsulates the least classifiable - and in many aspects the most remarkable - career in Mexican literature.
From Library Journal:
This challenging collection of 25 stories will introduce its noted Mexican author to most English-speaking readers for the first time. Chaotic and disturbing, the stories often feature a woman or women pulling other characters between sanity and madness or between life and death. In "Forty Springs," for instance, a woman and her dying mother bewitch an antiques dealer into purchasing?but leaving behind for their continued use?a rotted 40-year-old wicker armchair. In "The Guitar," another typically disturbing story, a man dying from hunger, heat, and thirst, grieves for a stolen instrument that is shaped like a woman. Throughout, Gardea depicts an arid, austere landscape, lonely and empty, a landscape of beating heat on the exterior and cruelty, violence, and vengeance on the interior. For literary and academic collections, especially where there is an interest in Hispanic literature.?Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib. McMinnville, OR
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