Ines Arredondo (1928-1989) published just three slim volumes of
stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great
writer, "a necessary writer," is firmly established in Mexico. Her
works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion,
prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters
are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both
excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships.
Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is
interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party
(a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality.
Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical
northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in
Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity.
Arredondo's adult male characters are often predators, depraved
collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in
"The Nocturnal Butterflies" and "Shadows in the Shadows" and the
dying uncle in "The Shunammite," who is kept alive by incestuous
lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to
protect them, the only thing standing between them and these
lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as
accomplices-along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic
Church-in the sordid age-old traffic in women.
"Underground River and Other Stories" is the first appearance of
Arredondo's stories in English.
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