The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Urban Oracles by Mayra Santos-FebresJane Juffer
Mayra Santos-Febres. Urban Oracles. Trans. Nathan Budoff and Lydia Platon Lazaro. Brookline Books, 1997. 129 pp. Paper: $15.95.
In her collection of short stories Mayra Santos-Febres distances herself from the power she exercises over her characters and the decisions they make; she doesn’t want to be the omniscient narrator playing God. Yet she also wants to acknowledge her own presence in the stories and to show in various strategies of self-revelation the power of narratives to construct reality. True to these conflicting desires, many of the stories seem unfinished; some are almost mystical in their refusal to tie together loose ends. They provide glimpses into characters’ lives without offering any resolutions to the often tragic problems presented. The characters are dwarfed by the structural problems of their homeland, Puerto Rico—the racism against darker-skinned people, the legacy of U.S. imperialism, the machismo, and the environmental havoc. At times, Santos-Febres foregrounds the ways in which texts other than her own construct reality, such as beauty ads for straightened hair. Despite the book’s emphasis on oppressive structures that seem immutable, the positions characters occupy in relation to these structures is rarely predictable. In “Abnel, Sweet Nightmare,” a lonely woman denied love into middle age rushes home from work in order to catch a glimpse of the naked man in the building across from hers as he steps out of the shower at the same time every day; she is a voyeur without any of the power usually accorded that position. Throughout the stories is a careful probing of the materiality of the body—its pleasures and pains—bodies infused with the sweat of labor yet able as well to offer momentary escapes of pure sensuality. [Jane Juffer]