Having edited a few fiction anthologies myself, I know how difficult
it is to “market” a story collection that doesn’t offer at least a few
“famous” names: You’re introducing yet another collection of unknown
writers into bookstores and the Internet.
Chances are, though, that a recognizable literary talent is already
dead—hence the cliché of great writers toiling in
obscurity until being discovered years later, when their efforts are
finally lauded, taught in university classrooms and widely
anthologized. This is the challenge that confronts a book like
Álvaro Uribe’s Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. It
features 16 writers, all of them born after 1945 (which means they
still walk the Earth), and all of their stories presented in a
bilingual format—Spanish text on the left page, English
translation on the right.
While I’ve never really understood the point of bilingual editions,
except to improve language instruction and translation, Dalkey Archive
has done an absolutely beautiful job of designing and presenting this
book for the lay reader—or at least those of us who may be
interested in what the new Mexican fiction looks, sounds, feels and
tastes like, especially since many of these writers (journalists,
academics, editors, translators and small publishers) are located not
that far away and merit attention.
Uribe’s anthology confirms that these writers deserve a vast
readership. Guillermo Fadanelli’s “Questioning Samantha” was the first
story that really smacked me upside the head, in a pleasant way, as it
relates a humorous slice of the life of protagonist Adolfo. Adolfo is a
newspaperman still struggling to cope with the death of his wife and to
raise his 11-year-old daughter, Samantha, who has been causing, well,
big problems at her school. As Adolfo’s day wears on, and he mentally
retrieves the psychic pain his new boss has inflicted on him in the
last week, the reader is immersed in the day-to-day challenges of a
simple man who succeeds in standing up for his daughter when he can’t
even take care of his appearance. (“Yes, Dad, and you have to get a
haircut,” says Samantha.) Fadanelli does neo-realism better than most
of his international peers.
If your taste runs more toward the fantasy-horror side of the
literary spectrum, you will undoubtedly enjoy Ana Garcia Bergua’s “The
Preservers,” about a widow named Marta. Marta adores her deceased
husband Pablo so much, she has her embalmer buddy preserve Pablo and,
instead of burying him, she props his dry, waxy corpse in front of the
TV:
The first thing that Señora Marta did with Pablo was seat
him in the sewing room and turn on the television. She felt such a
peace after she did it that she ate well for the first time in many
weeks, listening to the murmuring of the news and feeling again the
presence of the man who had been with her for so many years. At first,
she was a little afraid to turn off the television, close the door and
go to bed, leaving Pablo seated, alone and upright in the shadows. But
little by little, the routine made her lose her qualms.
Rather than veer in a predictably supernatural direction, Garcia
Bergua infuses her tale with dark hilarity, as Marta’s embalmer friend
visits with his girlfriend, a woman who shows more than an, um,
acceptable interest in Pablo. Jealousy ensues, with all the bitter
recriminations of a relationship between the (living) sexes. Like a
mutant hybrid of Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe and a sordid
telenovela, “The Preservers” grabs the reader’s imagination and
never lets go.
Another first-rate story in Mexican Fiction is Jorge
Hernández’s “True Friendship,” which is more (Herman) Melvillean
in its anxieties about isolation. Here, a New York Jew named Samuel
Weinstein continues to cultivate well into adulthood the fictional
accomplice of Bill Burton, upon whom shortcomings and missed
appointments are blamed. I won’t give away the ending except to suggest
that Sam gets a surprise visitor.
Each of the 16 stories is worthy of inclusion and eloquently
translated into English (by 16 different translators). From time to
time, I found myself comparing the Spanish text with the English
version, looking for clues as to how each piece might have been
approached in terms of word choice and syntax. Uribe, an editor
associated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has
honored contemporary Mexican literature and Mexico’s top
storytellers—unknown for now, but not for much longer.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.