Southpaw: Short Stories Book

Since the publication of Keepers of the House, which won the Somerset Maugham award in 1982, Lisa St Aubin de Teran has produced poetry, stories, novels and memoirs. In this collection of short stories, there are none of the early Borges' macho gauchos, only workers, prostitutes and troubled sons and daughters of South America. Magical realism, never easy to define, is partially but effectively summed up in the third tale, "Zapa. the fire child who looked like a toad": "[L]a Ciega was ... also a realist, he knew that even miracles had to be paid for; only calamity was free." This conflation of the harsh, basic realities of life (sun, family, death, landscape, work) and the strange and significant understandings apparently inherent in beans, orange trees, dirt tracks and dead rails lead these stories to a wide variety of conclusions. There are jokes, ghosts, rich and poor in the Barrios; literally, everything under the sun. The prose is clean storytelling, lending itself to be read aloud. And if the emotional impact is sometimes lost in the tales' weary voice, this may be the result of the delicate balance of a reality where magic is one of the easier--more sensible--ways of understanding both people and events. --John ShireRead More