A collection of short stories from famed Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo. Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) was an Argentine short story writer and poet. She started her creative career as an artist, studying under Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings greatly influenced the surrealist movement. Her friend and collaborator was Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection translated by Daniel Balderston (who was also Ocampo's friend) there are stories from the 1930s, when she started publishing, right up to the last decade of her life. That Ocampo's stories contain strong elements of surrealism and magic realism is an understatement. They are relentlessly trippy, discombobulating, hallucinatory and nightmarish. Her prose has an elegant, Baroque touch that is coupled with intricate, spidery dialogue exploring the far reaches of the human psyche. There are unsettling scenes from childhood (children are a mixture of the saintly and the devilish) and an obsession with heaven and hell. Death is everywhere in these stories and bizarre images abound. A woman and a horse both sink into a swamp; a velvet dress embroidered with a fantastical dragon suffocates its owner; a spider is placed in the bride's headpiece at her wedding. In one story eerily reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds, trained canaries peck out a man's eyes; in another a girl obsessed with dolls stops growing. In “Music of the Rain” a famous pianist gives a small concert playing water themed classics while a storm rages outside. While many of Ocampo's stories are bizarre and beyond interpretation, they are also written as hard, self-contained worlds that have a logic of their own. They can perhaps be read as stream of consciousness writing, often shifting shape and chameleon like. Personality is not fixed and rigid, but floats and interchanges. In the title story, “The Impostor”, we learn of the power of the imagination, or rather the power of paranoia, to manifest enemies. Our minds often work against us. A strange and evocative collection from a master surrealist. The Imposter and Other Stories, by Silvina Ocampo. Published by Serpent's Tail. $19.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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