Twelve tales - many evoking the uncanny, most with surprise endings
- explore how people seek to gain power from others. While perhaps
the entire collection is informed by political violence and
repression in the author's Guatemala, only one - "Angelica" -
touches outfight on the practices of political terrorism. In other
pieces, killing is ritualistic and at times existential. In "The
Proof," a boy kills a canary believing that if God exists, He will
prove himself by bringing the bird back to life; in "The Truth," a
young man drops a stone from a bridge "like a god from on high,
changing the life of a mortal." Domination and freedom are personal
- not political - goals and sought sometimes through trickery and
manipulation (as in "Burial," when an old man must play dead in
order to end his days as he wishes; and in "Xquic," in which a hoax
frees two academics from the university grind). "People of the
Head" seems to be uncomfortably racist in its narrative assumptions
until the ending turns those assumptions on their head. Throughout,
people take and fall moral tests whenever personal advancement is
at stake (as when the ethnomusicologist in "Las Lagrimas" helps
cause a death so that he can record funeral chants). "Coralia" -
about a woman, with "an ego as big as a cathedral," and the men she
manipulates - is perhaps the most realistic and one of the more
satisfying stories. Rey Rosa writes about danger and precarious
stability in an effective, straightforward style - but most of
these tales remain small and gimmicky. (Kirkus Reviews)
Set in Guatemala, these spare and beautiful tales are linked by
themes of magic, violence, and the fragility of existence. Paul
Bowle's translation perfectly captures Rey Rosa's stories of the
haunted lives of ordinary people in present-day Central
America.
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