Just a quick entry on Las Hortensias, a novella that I enjoyed reading, as strange as it was. I found it really eerie, but fascinating at the same time. I kept imagining it as a movie, visualizing scenarios playing out in my mind. I can imagine an appropriately dark, creepy filmic adaptation. The persistent noise of the factory next door, the dark, surreal tone, powerful imagery and symbolism and especially the bizarre characters reminded me of a David Lynch film.
Reading the story though, I was captivated at times, but other times, found my interest fading a bit. This could be because it takes me longer to read in Spanish, so I moved slowly through the story, but I think perhaps it could have been a short story instead of a novella and served the same purpose, but better. Las Hortensias is certainly not a long work, and maybe some will argue that its themes and story could have been developed more and drawn out into a lengthier novel. Still, I felt that it might have been better suited to a short story, and it reminded me of a short story I read in a Spanish class at UBC last year. In that class, we read a short story entitled “La puerta condenada” by an Argentinian writer named Julio Cortázar. It was a surreal, strange tale of a traveller staying in a hotel in Montevideo and he is constantly tormented by the sounds of a wailing, crying infant seemingly emanating from the room nextdoor, though he can never locate the source of the noise. Though it doesn’t sound thematically similar, the tone of “Las Hortensias” reminded me right away of “La puerta condenada.”
Felisberto’s “Las Hortensias”
Marta Brunet’s “Piedra Callada”
“—¡Je! —gruñó, quedándose perplejo.”
I tend to like short stories, like the ones I have read by JD Salinger and James Joyce in English, and Jorge Luis Borges in Spanish. I really enjoyed this story and found it ultimately very affecting and sad. I thought that the characters were developed in a way that made me really take an interest in them and care, when they could have easily just been simple types of familiar characters; the simple-minded farm labourer who grunts like a beast, the wicked witch of a mother-in-law.
As we discussed in class, in the story’s dialogue, Marta Brunet uses phonetic spellings to imitate the accents of Bernabé and Esperanza, while Eufrasia uses standard Spanish, as does the narration. I have read several books that do the same thing with dialogue in English, imitating the dialects of Black Americans in the works of Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison or Alice Walker, southern Americans in the writing of William Faulkner and Mark Twain, Scots in Irvine Welsh’s writing, Irish Australians in Peter Carey’s books, or Maoris in New Zealand author Alan Duff’s novels. There are lots of other examples of this technique, which I have found really effective in many cases. A lot of readers complain that it can be difficult to understand what the characters are saying when the author writes in a style imitating their dialect, as opposed to using standard English.
Reading “Piedra Callada,” I found that it’s a lot harder to read dialects like this in Spanish, since English is my first language. So I had some trouble with the dialogue written with the Chilean accent. “Claro qu’es así, medio lerdo, pero güeno y trabajaor como ni uno. D’esto puee dar fe cualesquiera en el fundo.” What? Pardon me, Esperanza? I sort of had to imagine the words spoken aloud in order to understand. But I found that it was well worth it, and I enjoyed the story.
Teresa de la Parra’s Memorias
I just wanted to comment on some of the things I have been enjoying about Las memorias de Mamá Blanca. Even though I don’t often read biographies or autobiographies, I find it interesting when authors are able to include autobiographical elements of their own life experiences into their writing, as Teresa de la Parra has done here. I also like the “manuscript” setting that de la Parra has used to frame the story. I find that the complicated relationship between the narrator, the editor and de la Parra herself (basing the story on her own life growing up on a Venezuelan sugar plantation with her sisters) through 3 different time periods is very interesting, although I have to admit to finding it quite confusing sometimes as well, especially at first, even though the initial “Advertencia” does a good job of explaining it. It made me think of one of the most memorable books I have read, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which also uses the trope of the “found manuscript” although in a different way.
I also like her descriptive writing style. For example, she writes lines rich with imagery and metaphor like “Como bandada de mariposas perseguidas, las frases originales han dejado sobre las paginas sus pintadas alas: las alas de la vida” (p. 74) Reading that line in an English book might sound overly flowery and silly to my taste, but reading it in Spanish in this novel, it at least makes the book more interesting to read for me, although I have to confess that the way she writes has me reaching for the dictionary quite a bit. These features have made the novel more interesting and enjoyable for me, since the plot and characters haven’t been that captivating to me and it has not been my favourite book. Still, these are the things I have enjoyed about it.
