The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Lands of Memory by Felisberto HernándezBen Lytal
Felisberto Hernández. Lands of Memory. Trans. Esther Allen. New Directions, 2002. 190 pp. $24.95.
Lauded as a founding father of magical realism by its favorite sons—Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and others—the eccentric Felisberto Hernández has received little attention in English-language circles. With Lands of Memory, New Directions provides a rounded collection that should endure more prominently than the only previous Hernández translation, the hard-to-find Piano Stories. The handsome green volume contains two novellas and four stories, each meditative and semi-autobiographical—typical of the graceful Uruguayan. Devoted to his mother but married four times, Hernández (or simply Felisberto, as he is lovingly referred to in Spanish letters) did not have to look far for a protagonist who carefully tracks his own shifting priorities. A frequently destitute pianist, he may not have had to invent his characters’ acts of desperate improvisation or their paranoid visions. His work is seldom magical in the classical sense of ghosts, eternal recurrence, and flowers falling from the sky. The closest contemporary descendent is perhaps Julio Cortázar, for Hernández’s magic, or nonrealism, is the by-product of first-person tales whose obsessive narrators have knocked down the wall between their minds and the empirical world. Such narrators, common enough in modern fiction, can be bizarrely heroic and then frustratingly pathetic. Hernández’s most memorable narrator is a pianist who has become a hosiery salesman, earning customers with self-induced weeping. The narrator himself is not sure that his tears are not genuine, and when his stuntmanship itself garners a female admirer, his will collapses, and Hernández produces a narrative gem: “I had placed my eyes on her legs. Then I took them away and my thoughts became embroiled. There was a displeased silence.” The mind’s eye is sutured to Felisberto’s; he takes the reader for a dozen laps, and the mind coheres centripetally even as the images blur. [Ben Lytal]