Hipólito G. Navarro

La vuelta al día (Around the Day) by Hipólito G. Navarro – A Review

~ bythefirelight

CORREA_LCA_C_La vuelta al día (Around the Day)
Hipólito G. Navarro
Páginas de Espuma, 2016, pg. 251

La vuelta al día (Around the Day) is Hipólito G. Navarro’s 2016 return to print after a long, eleven year absence. Navarro is a Spanish writer, mainly of short stories, who has been one of the seminal short story writers who began publishing in the 1990’s. His 1996 collection El aburrimiento Lester (The Boredom, Lester) is a virtuoso exploration of the short story form, both in terms of style and structure. He latter followed up with Los tigres albinos (2000) and Los últimos percances (2005), each of which continued his explorations of the short story form. (I’ve reviewed all three works here and his collection El pez volador, which takes stories from each of these collections.) Given the long absence from publishing, La vuelta al día is a much anticipated work.

At the core of much of Navarro’s work is humor. It is often dark or colored with a sense that the joke is some misfortune of one’s own making that is impossible to escape. Even in the length introduction to the collection he remarks that his mother, when he gave her a copy of his last book, Los últimos percances, as she was dying said,

¡Los últimos percances! ¿Por qué no le has puesto penúltimos, al menos?
The last misfortunes! Why didn’t you call it the penultimate, at least?

You most often see this sense in the Navarran unfortunate, usually it is the narrator, but occasionally it is just the main character of the story. The Navarran unfortunate is a man (it’s never a woman, although they can be the narrator) who through some obsession, large or inconsequential, has screwed up somehow. They are aware of the mistake and describe themselves in self depreciating tones that both show an acute self awareness and a deep fatalism about their future. Generally, the unfortunates reveal this desperation in a wildly verbal prose full of racing thoughts that are hard to control. Navarro is a rich stylist of the language and uses these monologues to full effect. Some of the unfortunates have a happier ends, but even they know that they are idiots and lucky to have gotten what they did.

In the latter category falls Ligamentos (Ligaments). A kind of love story, the narrator has an injured leg, but he meets a friend of a friend and is so taken with her he goes on a long walk with them in the woods. He knows nothing about nature, but he fakes as much as he can. The humor comes in his confessions to the reader about how little he knows about the world and his desperate, boyish attempts to keep up with her on the walk, which results in his further injury. The narrator is self aware of how silly he is, how every thing he does makes him even more ridiculous, and it gives him a sacrificial charm when finally wins her admiration by covering himself in remnants of the forest floor.

Verruga Sánchez takes the self obsessed male even further. Narrated by Sánchez’s wife, it’s the story of a Professor who is extremely popular with his students and well respected with his colleagues. The only issue is he has a distinctive mole near his eye. He can’t stand it any finally has it removed. Of course, it doesn’t go as he wishes and looses the adulation he’d grown accustomed too. He mopes around on the couch. It’s his wife who tries, unsuccessfully, but loyally to get him to forget it. It’s dark without the usual self pity: vanity allows no self reflection. Sánchez, like all of the unfortunates, has brought this on himself and has paid the price. What is notable is this is one of Navarro’s female narrators. It stabilizes the story, keeps the manic obsession at bay and makes it even sadder to know she still loves him.

Included are three much darker and riskier stories that I think may have gotten away from Navarro. La escusa termodinámica (The Thermodynamic Excuse) is narrated by a cuckold who’s wife has gone to a cabin in the woods with his brother. The desperate rant is a series of questions that the narrator asks himself about why he couldn’t start a fire. On its own the story has commendable aspects. Its when you get to something like Las estampas del timo with its light harted story of infatuation that includes incest, though, all these men become a little too much. Where it is the most distributing is the ultimate unfortunatein En el fondo de la memoria (In the Depths of Memory). Here Navarro creates his most manic character, a man who is pacing his small apartment, describing it as a kind of cell as he waits for his wife to bring her son home. The son does not live with them and he has never met the child. Yet he is afraid of the boy because he knows he is the father: he was the one who raped his wife. It is such a complicated statement, one that opens so many questions, some of credulity. I’m still not sure I can even contemplate the idea that the woman he raped would not know it was him somehow, or hadn’t seen the likeness already.

Whatever the case, all these stories give much of the collection a male-centric view of the world that is both self pitting and self obsessed, and leads to self destruction. When done right, as in Ligamentos and Verruga Sánchez, they are tragicomedies; when they misfire they are off putting.

Even though the Navarran unfortunate is heavily present, the real standouts, are his elegiac stories, stories that look to the past and find a restrained melancholy. The two standouts are El infierno portátil (The Portable Hell) and Tantos Veces Huérfano (So Many Times an Orphan). The former is the memory of a boy who worked in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop. Some nuns come down the hill from the convent to ask for hand outs. He notices the younger nun and as they look at each other for a moment he finds himself attracted to her. The story is handled deftly, the attraction is brief, subtle, as is the punishment the boy thinks he receives when the nun leaves. He is able to capture the sense of something new and uncontrolled in the briefest interlude. It’s in the unguarded moments that these realizations come.

Tantos Veces Huérfano, for me, is the best story of the collection. In it an old man remembers a journey to his father’s home town for the arrival of electric lights. It’s an awakening both in terms of sex and violence, all happening within his extended family. And it’s as memory is, unclear. Why was his father murder? The narrator doesn’t know. It’s the strength of the story that the narrator’s memory comes and goes, and an exact clarity of the events is illusive. Along with La vuelta al dia and La poda y la tala de los arboles (The Pruning and Triming of Trees), there is a sense of the past as both something alluring and melancholic, a place one would like to be, but a world that not only doesn’t exist, but in which one does not belong.

Finally, if humor and great verbal ability are two hallmarks of Navarro’s writing, the last is a playfulness. Los k (The ks) is a perfect example of this. The ks refer to kilobytes and the narrator imagines them as living creatures who have a mind of their own. They escape and he loses part of his novel. With this comes the sense that writing is something alive, something not only exists, but has its own independent life. He’s used stories like these to explore the short form and his earlier work was marked with this playfulness. In La vuelta al día we get a glimpse of this skill. I wish there had been a little more of this as they are delightful.

In all, the collection is a welcome return publication. There were certainly some misfires. The stories that dealt with the past were the strongest and most compelling, while those of the Navarran unfortunates show that Navarro is still in command of his verbal powers. Hopefully, it won’t be eleven years for the next collection.

My Article on Four UnTranslated Short Stories Is Up at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

My article about four untranslated Spanish short story writers is now up at the Quarterly Conversation. It turned out really well and is a much longer form article than I normally write coming in at a little over 3K words. While I think the stories mentioned in the article are great I had to leave out so many different ones that it seems at times I haven’t written that much. Writing about short stories is always hard because you end up with some many different ones and you have to try come up with some sort of thematic element to link them together. This was esspecially the case with these four, but I think I was able to do it.

Collections of short stories are generally considered difficult to market, and thus they’re often looked down upon by editors who acquire new works of literature in the United States. This fact is no less true when it comes to editors who acquire works of foreign literature translated into English, an already notably under-represented group. To make matters worse, what stories that do get translated are often lumped into anthologies of what you might call stories from over there, which obscure the full range of an author’s talent beneath the idea that one story is a representative sample.

This is all very important in the case of Spanish literature, which in recent decades has seen a rebirth of the possibilities of the short story. For authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story, this tendency has hidden a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inventions of Hipólito G. Navarro and the surrealism of Ángel Zapata, Spanish short story writers have created an exciting and diverse body of work marked by its openness and dedication to pushing the boundaries of the form.

I  have also commented on other stories from Navarro and Cubas. The rest of the Quarterly Conversation looks very good, too, and definately worth reading. They have a nicely timed overview of the works of Mercè Rodoreda. (You my reviews of Death in Spring and her short stories)

Los últimos percances (the Latest Misfortunes) by Hipólito G Navarro – a Brief Review

~ bythefirelight

I just finished the Los últimos percances (the Latest Misfortunes) by Hipólito G Navarro, which marks the last of the three books with in the short story collection by the same name. Written in 2005, it is his last collection of new work, although El pez volador, a selection of the stories from this book, came out a year or two ago. I can’t say much about the book as I am writing an article about his stories, but I can say this continues his experimental approach to short stories that I’ve been commenting on for the last few months. I think El aburrimeiento Lester (The Boredom, Lester) is my favorite volume in the collection, but this certainly has some funny and inventive stories such as 27/45 and La cabeza nevada (the snowy head). One thing I did notice is that his stories have gotten shorter and more dense. While Los tirgres albinos had a section of micro-stories (micro relatos in Spanish), in los ultimos, it was more pronounced. It has been a great pleasure to read all these stories and I’m still thinking of ways to sum them up, besides the sloppy “experimental”, which is only so useful.

Short Story from Hipólito G. Navarro at La nave de los locos

~ bythefirelight

The fine literary blog La nave de los locos has an unpublished short story from Hipólito G. Navarro a writer whose work I like. Although, I wouldn’t call this a story so much as a meditation or a reflection. That is often the case with very short stories. They aren’t so much a story with some action then a resolution, but a reflection what might have happened.

The first paragraph:

BALANCE

A un tigre, así sea albino, nunca le da por contar sus rayas. Tener algunas de más o de menos sobre la piel es asunto que le trae bastante al fresco….

Los Tigres Albinos (The Albino Tigrers) By Hipolito G Navarro – A Brief Review

~ bythefirelight

Los Tigres Albinos (2001) is the second of the three books of short stories collected in Los Últimos Percances and is further evidence shown in El AburrimientoLester (1996), the first book of the collection, of Navarro’s masterful command of the short story medium. His stories are always inventive, seeking to stretch the short story form. I’m not sure if I could pick a favorite out of the collection, since there are so many interesting stories. He can be quite funny too and many of his stories turn on the humors desperation of solitary characters. I don’t want to say too much more since I’m writing a review article for a different site, but it is a shame he’s not available in English.

A Short Story From Hipólito G. Navarro – Jamon En Escabeche

~ bythefirelight

Just in time for you Labor Day is a short story from Hipólito G. Navarro that I ran across on the blog El Laberinto de Noé. Jamon En Escabeche is from his 2000 book Los tigres albinos. It is a brief story so even if your Spanish isn’t that strong you may want to give it a try. He is one of the best short story writers in Spain today I would recommend his work if you can read Spanish (little of it exists in English).

Excellent Overview of the Spanish Short Story of the Last 20 Years at Sergi Bellver

~ bythefirelight

Sergi Bellver has an excellent article on trends in the Spanish short story of the last 20 years. It is well worth the look if you want to see what is going on and more importantly, know who is doing it. He has an excellent list of authors past and present including some of my perennial favorites, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Ana María Matute, Hipólito G. Navarro, and others I have read or am going to read such as Andres Neuman (one of the recent Granta writers) and Miguel Ángel Muñoz. I’m don’t exactly agree with some of his statements about the American short story scene which is on the defensive with fewer and fewer magazines printing short stories. It is also fascinating to see which Americans make the list of influential short story writers: Carver, Ford, Cheever, Capote y Shepard.

Tras la llamada Generación del Medio Siglo, el cuento conoció horas más bajas y sólo algunas obras esporádicas mantenían su aliento. Más tarde, los nuevos cuentistas españoles revivieron con piezas clave que, sin embargo, no bebían directamente de las generaciones anteriores. Eso produjo una suerte de espacio en blanco y, salvo importantes excepciones, las referencias vendrían de los grandes cuentistas norteamericanos (Carver, Ford, Cheever, Capote y Shepard), gracias a catálogos como el de Anagrama, y también de la tradición europea, empezando por Kafka. Así, Quim Monzó, heredero de Pere Calders, o el incomparable Eloy Tizón iban a convertirse en el paso de los 80 a los 90 en dos de las cabezas de puente de la regeneración del cuento en nuestro país. A renglón seguido vendrían libros extraordinarios como Historias mínimas (1988), de Javier Tomeo; Días extraños (1994), de Ray Loriga; El que apaga la luz (1994), de Juan Bonilla; El fin de los buenos tiempos(1994), de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón; El aburrimiento, Lester (1996), de Hipólito G. Navarro y Frío de vivir (1997), de Carlos Castán, entre otros muchos.

A partir de ese caldo de cultivo previo y gracias a expertos como Andrés Neuman o Fernando Valls y sus antologías Pequeñas resistencias 5 y Siglo XXI (publicadas respectivamente por las dos editoriales más especializadas en el cuento, Páginas de Espuma y Menoscuarto), y también a la labor de otros sellos independientes como Salto de Página, Tropo, Lengua de Trapo o Ediciones del Viento, el lector español tiene a su alcance una extensa nómina de cuentistas. Autores que trabajan las cuerdas fundamentales del cuento (Óscar Esquivias, Fernando Clemot, Iban Zaldua o Javier Sáez de Ibarra) o investigan en las grietas que pueden socavar el sentido de lo real (Juan Carlos Márquez, Víctor García Antón, Fernando Cañero o Jordi Puntí). Cuentistas que tocan lo fantástico y lo insólito (Ángel Olgoso, Pilar Pedraza, Félix J. Palma o Manuel Moyano) o que inscriben en el cuento su condición femenina sin hacer “literatura de mujeres” (Cristina Cerrada, Inés Mendoza, Sara Mesa o Eider Rodríguez). Autores latinoamericanos que también construyen el cuento español (Fernando Iwasaki, Norberto Luis Romero, Santiago Roncagliolo, Eduardo Halfon o Ronaldo Menéndez) y autores españoles que desconstruyen lo formal (Eloy Fernández Porta, Vicente Luis Mora, Juan Franciso Ferré o Manuel Vilas). Esta tremenda diversidad y efervescencia literaria garantizan, más que nunca, que el lector dispuesto se contagie, como de la fiebre más bella, de la buena salud del cuento español contemporáneo.

Short Stories from Spain At Cuatro Cuentos – Hipólito G. Navarro, Pilar Adón, Iban Zaldua y José Manuel Martín Peña

~ bythefirelight

The on-line journal Cuatro Cuentos’s newest edition is about Spain and has a story from one of the writers I’ve discovered recently and have enjoyed immensely, Hipólito G. Navarro. His story comes from his 2000 book Los Tigres Albinos. I haven’t had a chance to read the stories yet but I look forward to giving them a read soon.

Cuatrocuentos #12. Edición Especial España, a cargo del editor invitado Javier Sáez de Ibarra, con cuentos de  Hipólito G. Navarro, Pilar Adón, Iban Zaldua y José Manuel Martín Peña.

“Ahora los críticos españoles –dice Sáez de Ibarra– y también los periodistas, afirman que el cuento vive aquí un momento extraordinario y hasta empiezan a igualarlo a la consagrada entre nosotros generación del medio siglo (Aldecoa, Fernandez Santos, Martín Gaite, Rodoreda, Matute, Fraile). Quien esto escribe sabe que no verá el veredicto del futuro, que dicen que es el bueno, en tanto discrepa de las competiciones. Así que me complace el gusto de presentar a los lectores de Cuatrocuentos, a estos autores que espero muestren una diversidad de estéticas posibles y un rato suficientemente extenso para el placer lector. Conque allá van:
Hipólito Navarro, que ha ido ganando crédito como patriarca de lo breve, entre otras cualidades exhibe la de la construcción del relato. Las escenas se suceden con maestría, ofreciendo momentos y perspectivas que se suman, se comentan, se corrigen. Esto da lugar a la posibilidad de lo complejo, espacio a lo imaginable, silencios elocuentes y opciones para la interpretación; así como el sumo deleite de ir descifrando lo que se lee, o incluso después, cuando las páginas se han apagado y nos quedamos solos.

The Flying Fish (El pez volador) by Hipólito G. Navarro – A Review of the Spanish Short Story

~ bythefirelight ~ 6 Comments

EL PEZ VOLADOR
Hipólito G. Navarro
PAGINAS DE ESPUMA, 2008
Occasionally when you begin a short story collection it is quickly apparent that you are reading something masterful where each story shows great attention to structure, language and narrative. That might be enough to make a good collection, but Hipólito G. Navarro’s El pez volador goes beyond the well written and gives one a collection where every story is written in a different style so that his stories keep evolving and suggesting new ways to construct a story. His stories, if one has to categorize them, move from the somewhat realistic interior monologue to meta fiction to more stream of consciousness, although, each of those terms only serves to constrain his work. And little seems to constrain his work which is always surprising, whether it is a twist at the end of a story, a sudden shift in perspective, or his ever present sense of humor, the stories reveal Navarro as a master and one of important writers in the revitalization of the Spanish short story.

Brevity, Darkness, Humor

For Navarro, story telling is a two fold act: telling a story, and telling the story of the story.

El pez volador from Páginas de Espuma (unavailable in English) is a collection of Navarro’s stories published over the last 15 – 20 years. It is hard to know what order they were published in, which might give a sense of his development, but there is a sense of progression, from more familiar story telling to the more meta. Yet that gives the impression that everything he writes about is self referential and refers only to story telling, which is far from the case. For example, Las notas vicrias (The Vicar’s Grades) two boys are given an old piano from a move theater. They spend all their time playing it even though it is missing a few keys. They struggle to learn how to play, to master the music of the Beatles and the Blues, often ignoring their homework, which gets them in trouble. After a few years when they have become good musicians, a stranger moves to the outskirts of town where one of the boy’s father had sold him a house in his orchard. The man is solitary and there are whispers around town about the man who they call the vicar, but the narrator, 30 years latter, doesn’t understand why they used that word, which suggests he was celibate. The narrator knows he lived alone, so he finds the gossip confusing. One day his friend’s father has the piano tuned. When the boys go to play it they learn, to their horror, that what they had learned to play sounds horrible on the newly tuned piano. It isn’t music any more, and they give up, never to play it again. On top of the piano is a card from the tuner: it is the man who has moved to the orchard. Years latter he remembers that the home in the orchard burned down and the piano tuner died. No one cared much but there was talk that the fire was arson and the story ends as the narrator says,

…Rafa y yo, sabemos positivamente que sí que fue provocado.

…Rafa and I, we know that it was arson.

Many of the common elements of Navarro’s stories are here. First there is the humor, a kind of humor based in inexperience or naiveté. His stories are not cruel, and bitter satire is not one of his methods. Following the humor, is a kind of unsettling of dreams, not so much a shattering, although the boys certainly have their dreams shattered, but a comic undoing of what a first seemed so obvious—the piano is in tune. Yet that isn’t to say there isn’t darkness in his work. The conclusion suggests something extremely dark, a violence and revenge that is quite passionate. However, that violence is off page, something only hinted at and softened by the multiplicities of interpretations of the story. The multiplicity of possibilities and the disparate elements that make up the motivations of the story are another trademark of his work. Navarro, leaves as much unsaid as possible. For him, it as if the shorter the better. Las notas nicrias is slightly more than four pages, yet in that brevity he is able to be both funny and dark, starting with a coming of age story that ends in revenge and suggestions of abuse.

The stories Las frutas mas dulces (The Sweetest Fruit) and La cabeza nevada (The Snowy Head) are similar in style, and the power in these stories is how he reveals what is actually happening. In La cabeza neveda it is only until the last moment does a shift in understanding in who the narrator is does the story finally describe reveal itself. It isn’t so much that the story makes no sense until then, rather he lets you make sense of the story, then says what I just told you is true, but you made an assumption where you shouldn’t have. In Las frutas mas dulces he goes again into the dark. In a scant three pages he describes a young girl who gets revenge on her uncle by having sex with a boy who comes into his melon fields to violate the melons. While the girl has her revenge,  the question what kind of revenge has she gotten and with whom? Again, Navarro leaves one with more question than he answers.

Playing With Stories

Moving into the more meta or experimental, the story El tren para Irún, por favor? (The Train for Irun, Please?) is told with only questions. Every sentence is a question and it leaves many open ended thoughts. Yet he has structured it so that many of the questions are implicitly answered by the following question. It is an effective technique, although, I found myself a little tired of it part of the way through and then warmed to it again as the life of the narrator filled out more and more. El tren is probably the most autobiographical piece, too. In his interviews he has mentioned his father who owned a bar in a village in southern Spain and who eventually died of alcoholism. In this story, a son is returning to a village after his father has died. He hasn’t seen him for years and is full of questions about what he will find. Will he ever get to know his father, understand what it was like to be an immigrant in Germany in the early 70’s. From these questions, though, the troubled father emerges. Despite the unsettling number of questions, El tren para Irún, por favor? is probably the story that is the closest in theme to modern American short stories: family dysfunction.

In A buen entendor (Dieciocho cuentos muy pequeños redactados ipsofácticamente) (A Good Understander — 18 very small stories edited ipso factly) Navarro dispenses with even the semblance of traditional story telling and gives the reader a series of short pieces with titles that seem to edit themselves, as if there were two voices talking. Each piece seems unconnected with the next, but as the story comes to an end they begin to refine themselves and the story that contains the little stories finally takes shape. The writing is some of his most playful and meta at the same time. For example, he opens the story with this piece that sets the action, but also makes a little joke with the repetition of the title in the first phrase.

I came about the anouncment
—I came about the announcement.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Listen, this thing about fucking interests me
—Listen, this thing about fucking interest me.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio.
—Ya!, eso sel lo dirás todas.

Hombre, eso de follar me interesa
—Hombre, eso de follar me interesa.
—Ya, eso se lo dirás a todas.

Later, after several short bits, the phrase is repeated, but in a longer, more contextual frame:

I Came About the Anouncement
—I came about the announcement, he told her.
—Don’t fuck with me, she answered surprised (and no wonder).
—Listen, this thing about fucking interests me, came out suddenly.
—Alright, you already told everyone about it, replied the woman, inevitably.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio — le dijo.
—No me jodas — contstó ella asmobrada (y no era para menos).
—Hombre, es que eso de follar me interesa -soltó el de pronto.
—Ya, eso se le dirás a todas —replicó la chica, inevitablemente.

Each of these parts slowly builds a story and and expands the story. Ultimately, in the last bit he puts all the pieces together and each of them is a different way of looking at the character and his way of thinking. At the same time it is a way of looking at how a story is constructed in pieces, as if the characters who are living the story are writing it too.

Navarro’s playfulness extends to the title story, too. In Sucedáneo: pez volador (relato en varios tiempos e higienes) (Substitute: Flying Fish — A Story in Various Tempos and Hygienes) Navarro again plays with structure. This time he breaks ups the story into numbered sections that are thematically grouped by the numbering. He then breaks up all the story into little sections that are imagistic and leave the reader, as he does in so many of his stories, wondering how the story will come together. In Pez volador another one his common elements appears: the natural world. Navarro, a former biology student, put vivid descriptions of the natural world in his works. In this story the main character keeps his bath tub as a kind of stagnate pond filled with worms, fish, and other creatures. It is not only a pond for observing, but one for bathing in and the protagonist spends his time sitting in the bath letting the creature crawling over him. Naturally, that is something one would not want to let others know and he keeps the shameful secret. The contrast of the secret with the intertwining stories creates a tension that, as in many of the stories, the characters are isolated, in a world of their own making. The resolution of the story, brining the natural into the larger world, the character out his isolation, and tying all the threads of the story together, again creates a story whose resolution is not only the end of the story, but a resolution of that one particular exploration of story telling. For Navarro, story telling is a two fold act: telling a story, and telling the story of the story.

Navarro is considered one of the preeminent short story writers of the last 30 years. His works, especially El aburimiento, Lester (The boredom, Lester), have been touchstones for the revitalization of the Spanish short story since Spain emerged from the dictatorship of Franco. With his power as a story teller and stylist his stories are a continuation of the legacy of of the Spanish language short story by such notables as Julio Cortazar. Hopefully, one day more of his work will be available in English.

What’s In English?

So far there isn’t too much English from Navarro. This is a shame and hopefully more will become available. Unfortunately, he has two strikes against him: American’s don’t read a lot of works in translation; and short story collections tend not to be published. Mix the to together and we may be waiting for some time There are a few works out there for the diligent and I would recommend reading his stories if you can. The NH Hotel chain published a collection of stories called, Bedside stories 6, which contains a couple of stories. I have yet to see a copy anywhere on the Intenent, so good luck finding it. In the collection Been There, Read That! Stories for the Armchair Traveller from The University of Victoria in New Zeeland he has one story. The book is readily available through sites like Abe Books. And the author has said that his translator Nicola Gilmour is working on a story for Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction, one can only hope it will come out in 2011. If it does come out, it will be the easiest way for and American to read one of his stories.

Occasionally when you begin a short story collection it is quickly apparent that you are reading something masterful where each story shows great attention to structure, language and narrative. That might be enough to make a good collection, but Hipólito G. Navarro’s El pez volador goes beyond the well written and gives one a collection where every story is written in a different style so that his stories keep evolving and suggesting new ways to construct a story. His stories, if one has to categorize them, move from the somewhat realistic interior monologue to meta fiction to more stream of consciousness, although, each of those terms only serves to constrain his work. And little seems to constrain his work which is always surprising, whether it is a twist at the end of a story, a sudden shift in perspective, or his ever present sense of humor, the stories reveal Navarro as a master and one of important writers in the revitalization of the Spanish short story.

El pez volador from Páginas de Espuma (unavailable in English) is a collection of Navarro’s stories published over the last 15 – 20 years. It is hard to know what order they were published in, which might give a sense of his development, but there is a sense of progression, from more familiar story telling to the more meta. Yet that gives the impression that everything he writes about is self referential and refers only to story telling, which is far from the case. For example, Las Notas Vicrias (The Vicar’s Grades) two boys are given an old piano from a move theater. They spend all their time playing it even though it is missing a few keys. They struggle to learn how to play, to master the music of the Beatles and the Blues, often ignoring their homework, which gets them in trouble. After a few years when they have become good musicians, a stranger moves to the outskirts of town where one of the boy’s father had sold him a house in his orchard. The man is solitary and there are whispers around town about the man who they call the vicar, but the narrator, 30 years latter, doesn’t understand why they used that word, which is similar to priest and suggests he was celibate. The narrator knows he lived alone, so he finds the gossip confusing. One day his friend’s father has the piano tuned. When the boys go to play it they learn, to their horror, that what they had learned to play sounds horrible on the newly tuned piano. It isn’t music any more, and they give up, never to play it again. On top of the piano is a card from the tuner, who is the man who has moved to the orchard. Years latter he remembers that the home in the orchard burned down and the piano tuner died. No one cared much but there was talk that the fire was arson and the story ends as the narrator says,

…Rafa y yo, sabemos positivamente que sí que fue provocado.

…Rafa and I, we know that it was arson.

Many of the common elements of Navarro’s stories are here. First there is the humor, a kind of humor based in inexperience or naiveté. His stories are not cruel and bitter satire is not one of his methods. Following the humor, is a kind of unsettling of dreams, not so much a shattering, although the boys certainly have their dreams shattered, but a comic undoing of what a first seemed so obvious—the piano is playing correctly. Yet that isn’t to say there isn’t darkness in his work. The conclusion suggests something extremely dark, a violence and revenge that is quite passionate. However, that violence is off page, something only hinted at and softened by the multiplicities of interpretations of the story. The multiplicity of possibilities and the disparate elements that make up the motivations of the story are another trademark of his work. Navarro, is a master of leaving as much unsaid as possible. For him, it as if the shorter the better. Las Notas Vicrias is slightly more than four pages, yet in that brevity he is able to be both funny and dark, starting with a coming of age story that ends in revenge and suggestions of abuse.

The stories Las frutas mas dulces (The Sweetest Fruit) and La cabeza nevada (The Snowy Head) are similar in style, and the power in these stories is how he reveals what is actually happening. In La cabeza neveda it is only until the last moment does a shift in understanding in who the narrator is does the story finally describe reveal itself. It isn’t so much that the story makes no sense until then, rather he lets you make sense of the story, then says what I just told you is true, but you made an assumption where you shouldn’t have. In Las frutas mas dulces he find goes again into the dark. In a scant three pages he describes a young girl who gets revenge on her uncle by having sex with a boy who comes into his melon fields to violate the melons. While the girl has her revenge,  the question what kind of revenge has she gotten and with whom? Again, Navarro sets leaves one with more question than he answers.

Moving into the more meta or experimental, the story El tren para Irún, por favor? is told with only questions. Every sentence is a question and it leaves many open ended thoughts. Yet he has structured it so that many of the questions are implicitly answered by the following question. It is an effective technique, although, I found myself a little tired of it part of the way through and then warmed to it again as the life of the narrator filled out more and more. El tren is probably the most autobiographical piece, too. In his interviews he has mentioned his father who owned a bar in a village in southern Spain and who eventually died of alcoholism. In this story, a son is returning to a village after his father has died. He hasn’t seen him for years and is full of questions about what he will find. Will he ever get to know his father, understand what it was like to be an immigrant in Germany in the early 70’s. From these questions, though, the troubled father emerges. Despite the unsettling number of questions, El tren para Irún, por favor? is probably the story that is the closest to modern American short stories: family dysfunction.

In A buen entendor (Dieciocho cuentos muy pequeños redactados ipsofácticamente) (A Good Understander — 18 very small stories edited ipso factly) Navarro dispenses with even the semblance of traditional story telling and gives the reader a series of short pieces with titles that seem to edit themselves, as if there were two voices talking. Each piece seems unconnected with the next, but as the story comes to an end they begin to refine themselves and the story that contains the little stories finally takes shape. The writing is some of his most playful and meta at the same time. For example, he opens the story with this piece that sets the action, but also makes a little joke with the repetition of the title in the first phrase.

I came about the announcement
—I came about the announcement.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.
Listen, this thing about fucking interests me
—Listen, this thing about fucking interest me.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio.
—Ya!, eso sel lo dirás todas.
Hombre, eso de follar me interesa
—Hombre, eso de follar me interesa.
—Ya, eso se lo dirás a todas.

Later, after several short bits, the phrase is repeated, but in a longer, more contextual frame:

I Came About the Announcement
—I came about the announcement, he told her.
—Don’t fuck with me, she answered surprised (and no wonder).
—Listen, this thing about fucking interests me, came out suddenly.
—Alright, you already told everyone about it, replied the woman, inevitably.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio

—Yo venía por lo del anuncio — le dijo.

—No me jodas — contstó ella asmobrada (y no era para menos).

—Hombre, es que eso de follar me interesa -soltó el de pronto.

—Ya, eso se le dirás a todas —replicó la chica, inevitablemente.

Each of these parts slowly builds a story and and expands the story. Ultimately, in the last bit he puts all the pieces together and each of them is a different way of looking at the character and his way of thinking. At the same time it is a way of looking at how a story is constructed in pieces.

Celebrating the Small Press: Spain’s Páginas de Espuma

~ bythefirelight

Recently I read two books from the publisher Páginas de Espuma, a Spanish press devoted to the art of the short story. Both España, a parte de mi estos premios (Fernandow Iwasaki), and El pez volador (Hipólito G. Navarro) are very good and are part of the resurgence of the Spahish short story. Páginas de Espuma has published many of the writers that are part of the resurgence and fills an important role in celebrating an art that is often held in less esteem than the novel. But the catalog doesn’t stop at modern Spanish writers, but includes thematic collections and republications of older writers. Recently they published an edition of Poe’s stories with an introduction for each story written by a different author. With El pez volador they have introduced a new series, Vivir del Cuento (Living with stories) that I hope they continue with. The books is divided into three parts: a long overview of the work of the author; a representative sample of the author’s stories; a long interview with the author. It is a great way to get an introduction to an author’s work, especially if you are not familiar with his or her milieu. Hopefully, next time I get to Spain I can pick up a few more books of theirs.

Celebrating the Indepedent Book Store – Madrid’s Short Story Only Shop

~ bythefirelight

Some say that Spain has been enjoying a renaissance of the short story. You can see part of that in Madrid’s Tres Rosas Amarillas (Three Yellow Roses) which only carries short stories. It isn’t a big shop, but it looks interesting. It makes me almost wish I was going to Madrid this year. For those inclined, you can find a short story by Hipólito G. Navarro written for the shop (pdf). I haven’t read it yet. His page of recommended short stories is an interesting mix of Spanish and international.

Javier Sáez de Ibarra Wins the First Internacional Prize for Short Stories

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País reports that Javier Sáez de Ibarra has won the first Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero (International Prize for Short Stories Ribera del Duero). I don’t know what weight to put in awards, even ones that come with €50,000. However, the article and accompanying interview has some interesting items that makes me want to find an example or two of his writing.

The short story is a genre that is not well esteemed by editors, little ready by readers, and not well understood by critics: there still are those who criticize a story that doesn’t have a surprise. Inovations are not well received.

“El cuento es un género poco estimado por los editores, poco frecuentado por los lectores y mal comprendido por los críticos: todavía hay quien le reprocha a un relato que no tenga efecto sorpresa. Las innovaciones no son bien recibidas”.

He also said that the Internet is helping to save the shor story.

In a certain sense the short story has taken refuge in the Internet. There are many blogs that publish stories and those that criticize stories. An example? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue or the critic Fernando Valls’s.

“En cierto sentido, el cuento se ha refugiado en Internet. Hay muchos blogs que publican cuentos y en los que se hace crítica de cuentos. ¿Algún ejemplo? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue o el del crítico Fernando Valls”

I’m not sure if I believe that in the US we pay more attention to short story writers. He did list a few other autors of note: Hipólito G. Navarro who was on El publico lee and sounded interesing; from Peru Fernando Iwasaki; from Guatemala Eduardo Halfon; from Mexico Pedro Ángel Palou; and from Spain Luciano G. Egido y Juan Carlos Márquez.