The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Symmetries by Luisa ValenzuelaD. Quentin Miller
Luisa Valenzuela. Symmetries. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. High Risk/Serpent’s Tail, 1998. 167 pp. Paper: $14.99.
It takes a clever author to breathe new life into the exhausted genre of the postmodern metafiction that has been treated so thoroughly by such prominent writers as Calvino, Borges, and Barth. In this collection of stories Luisa Valenzuela gives further evidence that she should be counted among these masterful authors of stories about storytelling. Valenzuela adds violence to their playfulness, and her stories are driven by a deadly urgency. Even though all of these stories are about narration and language, the reader is more likely to be unsettled by the intense confrontations between men and women than amused by Valenzuela’s cleverness.
In two sections entitled “Cuts” and “Symmetries” the reader of postmodern fiction is on familiar ground. There are stories in which characters act only in order to fulfill a narrated plot, or narrators call attention to the difficulties of narration. Two other sections of the collection, “Firytales” and “Messianisms,” include twisted renditions of familiar fairy tales and biblical stories. Valenzuela’s vision of these “sacred” texts is dark and imaginative, exploring the possibilities that exist in our versions of these stories and leading us to consider them from a new perspective. In one story, she considers the possible transformation of a woman who has slept entranced in the woods for a hundred years: “if . . . her body gives off a certain whiff of mildew and her pubic hair grows like lichen, the Prince doesn’t mind.” In another story God alters the nature of the world by renaming himself “President of the Club.”
The remaining cluster of stories, entitled “Storms,” stands apart from the others in that the unifying factor is the repeated motif of storms rather than some stylistic or thematic connection. The storms within these stories often dictate the plots, but they also underscore the violence and disruption which characterize all of the stories in the collection. Storms might be a fitting title for these stories, but they are well considered in terms of the symmetries between our world and our fictional rendition of it. [D. Quentin Miller]