THE WORD OF THE SPEECHLESS

Sometimes bleak, sometimes warily humorous stories by Peruvian writer Ribeyro.

Ribeyro (1929-1994) is in the second tier of the Latin American Boom, much less well known than his compatriot Mario Vargas Llosa, to say nothing of Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Jorge Luis Borges. The latter’s influence can be sensed in some of the stories gathered here, especially the ones in which Ribeyro’s protagonists turn out to be ghosts, as the closing of the first story, “Tracks,” reveals: “He remembered that the monogram on the handkerchief were his initials, and he no longer had any doubt that inside his room the spectacle of his own death had just taken place.” In another story, a fisherman similarly awaits his own murder; in still another, a bankrupt man considers the relief that a plunge down a seaside cliff, “that precise border between the earth and the sea,” might bring. Some of Ribeyro’s stories, especially the earlier and the shorter ones, are imbued with death, sometimes revealed, sometimes acknowledged at the very beginning of a story (“But he…found little interest in all of these subjects, as he had been dead for three days”). Almost all have a kind of knowing cynicism to them, with ironic distance but not without humor, as with the long story that gave its title to a late collection, “For Smokers Only”; there, the protagonist, a chain smoker like the author himself, admits to a host of health problems—“indigestion, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, dizzy spells, and a stomach ulcer”—that have beset him while concluding that, well, since Flaubert smoked so much that his mustache was yellow and Gorky and Hemingway were also addicted to tobacco, there may just be good literary reason to keep puffing away. 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.