[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.
The book’s title alludes to the voices of the underclass within these stories, which often center on Peru’s bricklayers or fishermen ... Balancing the naturalism are paranormal tales reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. A character becomes obsessed with, and haunted by, his double. Others stumble upon signs of their approaching death. I like the spooky absurdity of 'The Insignia,' in which a man finds a curiously engraved ring in a trash can. Upon wearing it, he is invited into a shadowy cabal, and over the years he rises in its ranks and is eventually appointed president—without ever learning what exactly the group is...
Elegance in the formal design skillfully contains the chaotic lives of Ribeyro's characters. As author, he strikes the required distance enabling him to situate best these refined tales in which shame, humiliation, unbridled lust, infatuation, or plain derangement throb just beneath the skin of his creations ... On the other hand, Ribeyro seems almost indefatigable in the imaginative heights to which he scales in a more ambitious and lengthier 'Silvio in El Rosedal', perhaps the most mysterious tale in the collection ... It would be misleading to believe that Ribeyro confined himself to skewering bourgeoisie pretensions or that he was interested only in the prosperous denizens of Peru. In a letter to his editor, he once expressed his goal, which was to speak for 'the marginalised, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice.' Hence, the title of the selection ...The story 'At the Foot of the Cliff', with its indigent, struggling beach dwellers living in shacks assembled from scrap iron and stone best exemplifies this thread in Ribeyro's work.
As the title of this volume indicates, there is in fact a politics at play here even if it is one that consists of expanding perspectives rather than articulating clear positions ... Although that effort to incorporate new voices is not always obvious throughout this career-spanning anthology (which also uses the letter excerpt as a sort of epigraph), there is unfailingly a space for studying the sentiments he identified ... Ribeyro powerfully captures this mixture of shame and a strange sense of diminished yet still definable power, which is to say a feeling of holding onto one thing in order to avoid acknowledging how another slowly slips away ... a stirring reflection on the relationship between distress and dignity ... Katherine Silver...not only irons out the occasionally inelegant syntax in previous versions of Ribeyro’s sometimes sinuous prose but also consistently locates a rich sonority within it ... Ribeyro...changes...our gaze. Reality continues to be the same, but we view it through his work, which is to say through a different lens.
The late Peruvian writer’s knack for the uncanny is on display in these gripping stories culled from a body of work spanning 40 years ... As the collection progresses in time, continuing through to the early ’90s, the stories become more plotted and less creepy, but retain their theme of focusing on a single male character ... The later stories go on too long and lack the tight, enthralling storytelling from earlier work, and in general the reader becomes a bit fatigued by the expectation of an inevitable wink at the end of each story. Nevertheless, these pieces dig into the human psyche with sharpness and wit.
Sometimes bleak, sometimes warily humorous stories by Peruvian writer Ribeyro ... Albeit happy endings are few, Ribeyro’s stories often offer unexpected twists, their characters mysteriously disappearing in a flurry of snow or puffs of smoke from cigarettes here and guns there. A welcome selection of prose that introduces a Latin American master to English-language audiences.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
