Available in English for the first time, a collection of stories depicting marginalized populations by one of the greatest South American writers of the 20th century.
[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.
