The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Frigid Tales, by Pedro de Jesús, translated by Dick Cluster
reviewed by David Bergman

Pedro de Jesús. Frigid Tales. Trans. Dick Cluster. City Lights, 2002. 105 pp. Paper: $11.95.

Despite the title, there is nothing frigid about these tales—what appears to be coldness is all on the surface. True, the characters of these six interrelated stories are often uncomfortable with their sexuality and sometimes believe they would be happier if they weren’t so horny all the time, and true, too, Pedro de Jesús makes use of the cerebral and distancing forms of postmodern fiction, although he cannot resist descending into a realism he has been taught to disparage—in short, the stories are the product of a young man who believes that his libido is getting in the way of his art but nevertheless cannot hide his old-fashioned passion for love stories. De Jesús seems to have taken Freud at his word that there are always at least four people having sex at any time. Usually in his stories there seem to be even more, since the characters keep changing their sex and their sexual orientation. In “Images, Questions Re: Beautiful Dead Woman” he gives the characters numbers, as if we couldn’t tell them apart without a scorecard. In fact, even with the numbers I couldn’t tell them apart. No matter. In one’s twenties all heartbreaks are the same—painful, narcissistic, and self-destructive. Ironically, the volume rests on de Jesús’s most traditional stories: “The Portrait” and the campily titled “How to Act in 1830,” his homage to Stendhal. It is a story worthy of Stendhal in its passion, playfulness, and social and psychological subtlety. The story is so wonderfully perverse that it makes me wonder how de Jesús continues to work in Cuba and what might happen to him as an artist in the post-Castro world.