PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)[Ribeyro] belonged to Peru’s 50s Generation, whose great theme was urban change caused by mass migration to Lima, and the social traps and types thrown up by over-rapid modernization. The early stories certainly address this; the later ones are more interior, retrospective, mildly satirical. This volume is selected from a range powered by restraint, over nine collections, the last of which came out in 1992 ... The bulk of Ribeyro’s post-Peruvian work evokes milieux he knew, or had known, intimately: impoverished Lima gentry, struggling students, exiled artists. Alert to the fakery of power systems rather than their brutality, he is drawn to their decline ... The most effective work dwells on the poignancy of hope in a disenchanted world, so timelessly that only the datedness of Ribeyro’s women jars ... In fiction as in self-portrayal, ironic pathos flavours Ribeyro’s pessimism. Compatriots like Mario Vargas Llosa, only seven years younger, would take a harsher and more experimental road.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
