It is tempting to file the remarkable stories in Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke under 'magic realism' and close the drawer. But that would be an incomplete reading of the collection and a misreading of the genre, an elastic label that offers a rather easy recipe for critics — have people; add wings. Which is not to say Gallardo’s fiction has no wings ... The story suggests a blurry moral and reads like a highly orchestrated dream. Gallardo, on the other hand, wants us to believe ... Frankly, not much happens, and it’s only two pages long. But it flies. Almost a sketch, the story achieves a brief, uncanny completeness, which proves typical of the nearly fifty more (very) short stories in the collection. Read them sequentially and they accrue something more than magic, they radiate a marvelously strange mythopoetic intensity. The book is a bible.
The stories usually end with an abrupt twist. Gallardo always makes her purpose known this way. She writes with an air of authority (which Jessica Sequeira has translated from Spanish brilliantly) that begs your trust when she writes that trains can dream or that horses can murder ... the detailed settings and the depths of human experience (even when characters are not human) remain timeless ... Gallardo’s succinct descriptions define the tangible—the weather, the landscape, the physical circumstances—while her plots are fantastical. The former grounds the latter, making anything seem possible.
Gallardo’s meticulous returns to the historical moments in which her texts unfold rescues her work from the whimsy which some of her Latin American contemporaries use as a default mode ... Some of the stories, which span the centuries, are less than a page long ... poignant and emblematic ... Along with violence and melancholy there’s humour here as well ... The very short story, at which Gallardo excels, is a gift to the poet as it makes no necessary demands of narrative muscle ... But in this story the reader might well feel, after a twenty-page journey, deprived of the conventional satisfactions that parts of the narration, and its Perrault-like title, promise ... there are times, as in this story, when the reader has the feeling of being lost in a vaguely nightmarish dream that doesn’t quite reveal the reason for its own menace ... it was evidently the author’s intent to create her own variant of a many-voiced ocean of stories in the manner of the ancients, with facets that echo, reflect, and collide with each other. It’s a massively ambitious, and often successful, task.
Atmospheric details capture ice floes, desolate caves, and plains over which the wind whips and bites ... Some stories, like 'Cristóbal the Giant,' are imaginative etiologies that locate the nexus of natural beauty in deep, visceral need; others, like 'Georgette and the General,' are entirely, achingly human ... At all turns, these stories are unsettling, surprising, and unmissable. Land of Smoke is a bountiful collection of short stories, full of sharp edges, odd magic, and unexpected allure.
Rediscovered Argentinian Gallardo's (1931-1988) short story collection pushes the form in new and unexpected directions ... Playful and philosophical, many of Gallardo's stories are written in the style of fables ... Gallardo has a strong, original, unsentimental style ... This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands the canon.
...a spellbinding look into the work of a virtuoso of magical realism ... The breadth of her imagination is staggering, and her clean, evocative prose unites the disparate pieces elegantly ... Gallardo clearly takes pleasure in experimentation; though each story carries her voice, they are all playfully diverse in structure and tone, and a delight to read. Admirers of magical realism will find Gallardo’s work a worthy object of attention.
