One of the stories in this collection is called “Lovers”, and in it, an enamoured couple meet clandestinely in a Buenos Aires park to (among other things) eat slices of cake and peanuts.
Licking their lips, they attempted a shy conversation on the theme of picnics: people who had died after drinking wine or eating watermelon; a poisonous spider in a picnic basket one Sunday that had killed a girl whose in‑laws all hated her; canned goods that had gone bad, but looked delicious, had caused the death of two families in Trenque Lauquen; a storm that had drowned two couples who were celebrating their honeymoons with hard cider and rolls with sausages on the banks of a stream in Tapalqué.
This is typical Silvina Ocampo: either a description of the disaster itself, or the relating of it. The first thing the (very good) introduction, by Helen Oyeyemi, tells us is that “In 1979 her 42‑year body of work was denied Argentina’s national prize for literature. ‘Demasiado crueles’ (far too cruel) was the verdict of that year’s panel of judges.” And among the last things we learn, in the afterword by the (very good) translator, Daniel Balderston, is that “Ocampo insisted that we choose her cruellest stories” for a 1988 compilation; this is a much-expanded edition.
You can imagine her saying so with a touch of glee, a laugh we are invited to share, but rest assured: she is very much a spider‑in‑the‑picnic‑basket kind of writer.
Yet there is more to her than that. There’s also a foreword here by Jorge Luis Borges from 1988 and while he, too, testifies to this cruelty (albeit one that is “innocent and oblique”), he also writes: “Silvina has a virtue that is frequently ascribed to the ancients … clairvoyance. More than once, and not without feelings of apprehension, I have felt hers. She sees us as if we were made of glass, sees and forgives us. It is useless to try to fool her.”
There are 42 stories here, dating from 1937 to 1988, when she began to lose her mind (she died five years later, aged 90), and they are far more than merely instances of a kind of literary sadism. Often she goes off on a tangent that no one else could have followed. She can open up a world that leaves you giddy with unfamiliarity. The story about the person poisoned by a stew made with stuffed dog may be superficially Roald Dahl‑esque but the tone is all her own, and there is a haunting ambiguity as to whether the poisoned man deserved his storybook fate. Another, “Report on Heaven and Hell”, just one page long, ends with the lines “I know people who because of a broken key or a wicker birdcage went to Hell, and others who for a sheet of newspaper or a glass of milk went to Heaven.” As you can see from this and from the lovers’ picnic story, she is fond of adding sinister weight to the trivial detail; and as you can also see, her confidence in our destinations in the afterlife is strangely convincing. No wonder she made Borges apprehensive.
Ocampo’s technique is beyond all reproach; an author has to keep masterly control when letting events veer off beyond the quotidian (the phrase “magic realism” seems inadequate when applied to her). The longest story here, “The Impostor”, has a twist in it that I didn’t see coming and I bet you won’t either, but it is, psychologically speaking, entirely possible, if unlikely: more realism than magic, for all its dark, dreamlike atmosphere. And then sometimes we have to stop and reread a sentence, as if our disbelief has been suddenly tickled awake. This is a reaction we have to many of her stories: do we wake or dream?
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