That I love animals, even the creepy-crawlies, is a given. There was a time I spotted a giant spider with a furry back on a window sill in Mundakotukkurussi, and my first instinct was to stroke it. To me it looked like a furry little kitten, till sense prevailed. But it was with the Alaskan Wood Frog that I first felt a true sense of kinship. During winter, this clever creature turns into a frog-shaped piece of ice. It stops breathing and its heart stops beating. When spring comes, the ice thaws and the frog becomes a living breathing creature again.
That’s the near state I slip into when I write. Time and life stands still. It’s only when my chest starts to hurt that I realise that I have been holding my breath. So it is when I read short stories. The very nature of that form demands that sort of an absorption. It irks me no end when writers treat short stories like a dwarf novel trying to pack into it scope and expanse while what it truly demands is depth, an intensity that is visible almost instanteously. As Irish short story writer Sean O’Faolain puts it, ‘‘Like a child’s kite in the sky, a small wonder, a bright, brief moment.’’
For a very long time, most of us readers have seen the novel as the true form of Latin America. I don’t even remember having read any short stories at all from the Latin American writers whose novels I have devoured. Latin American writing is by itself an interesting canon. As Borges once wrote, the European writer exists as a consequence of his national literary tradition while the Latin American writer moves about amongst all traditions, as he likes, with a larger appetite.
So when I stumbled upon The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories, a collection of short fiction by 39 writers from different parts of Latin America, it felt like the ultimate tasting menu. A nibble here, a nibble there, a forkful of this, a spoonful of that.
Take ‘The Wardrobe, the Old Man and Death’ by Julio Ramon Ribeyro, the Peruvian writer. It has several of the classic elements of Latin American writing if that’s what one is drawn to—a baroque almirah, magic realism, elements of ancestors who live in its mirror, football and a gentleman farmer father. But it also has an epiphany, its kite in the sky moment of beauty when the football smashes the mirror and frees the father from the past and it is all written in beautiful but simple prose. In contrast is the Brazilian Clarice Lispector’s story ‘Love’ where Anna the perfect wife, mother, home maker who has ‘‘achieved a woman’s destiny, with the surprise of conforming to it almost as if she had invented that destiny herself’’ feels it fall asunder on seeing a blind man chewing gum. The “giddiness of compassion” makes her realise the hollowness of her carefully constructed world.
Such is the shaping of literature. And then one wonders why publishers and booksellers shy away from short stories while books that are more doorstoppers than literature, continue to find takers. Meanwhile, I continue to read short stories where I can find them. And like my twin the Alaskan Wood Frog, I will hold my breath hoping for the spring to come.
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