The Word of the Speechless
Selected Stories
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
Available in English for the first time, a collection of deeply humane stories depicting marginalized populations by one of the greatest South American writers of the 20th century.
The Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro is one of the masters of the short story and a major contributor to the great flourishing of Latin American literature that followed the Second World War. In a letter to an editor, Ribeyro said about his stories, “in most of [them] those who are deprived of words in life find expression—the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored to them the breath they’ve been denied, and I’ve allowed them to modulate their own longings, outbursts, and distress.” This is work of deep humanity, imbued with a disorienting lyricism that is Ribeyro’s alone. The Word of the Speechless, edited and translated by Katherine Silver, introduces readers to an indispensable and unforgettable voice of Latin American fiction.
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The late Peruvian writer's knack for the uncanny is on display in these gripping stories culled from a body of work spanning 40 years. Those written in the early '50s are populated with sinister figures often posed as familiar subjects such as, in the case of "Meeting of Creditors," tax collectors. The stories range from the macabre, as with "Nothing to be Done, Monsieur Baruch," in which a man abruptly slits his own throat, to the mysterious, as with the man in "Doubled" who goes searching for his doppelg nger. Ribeyro (1929 1994) also trades in satire and irony "A Literary Tea Party" watches a group of bourgeois intelligentsia as they wait around for a famous writer expected to attend their party. As the collection progresses in time, continuing through to the early '90s, the stories become more plotted and less creepy, but retain their theme of focusing on a single male character. "Silvio in El Rosedal" is a complicated story about a bachelor who inherits an estate in the Italian countryside. The later stories go on too long and lack the tight, enthralling storytelling from earlier work, and in general the reader becomes a bit fatigued by the expectation of an inevitable wink at the end of each story. Nevertheless, these pieces dig into the human psyche with sharpness and wit.
