Perfect book to get if you are trying to learn Spanish (or indeed English, if you are a Spanish speaker): very short stories presented in both English and Spanish.
Somewhere there is a point where cultural anthropology and literary theory meet and, surprisingly, this point can exist within a person's own experience, within their biography, within their memory. I lived the art of oral story-telling as a child and as a neighbour during the long nights of the filandon as it is known in my part of the world. I have also studied and researched literature for almost as long as I have been alive. The anthropological value of our great oral tradition still lives in my memory. It is a ritual that was kept alive until certain ways of life in rural communities began to disappear in the final third of the last century. I am talking of my homeland Leon, an enclave in the northwest of the Spanish peninsula, akin to those northern European cultures that share with us the changing fortunes and vicissitudes of collective memory. We all know well how Romanticism revived fables, myths, tales and legends to revitalise this rich heritage.
I discovered what fiction was by understanding that when people have no data with which to interpret their reality, they attempt to understand it through stories, the most valuable and ancient aid to the imagination; because fiction, the narrative of the imagination, is a way of interpreting reality through the creation of symbols and this process is part of the human condition. Fiction belongs to us by natural right. It is our primary form of conscious wisdom. On the stage of the filandon, in those neighbourly winter gatherings at night, the spoken word - that ancestor of literature which is handed down by repetition and shapes the collective memory - shines as a primary means of talking about the world. It invents, consoles, disturbs, sparks emotions and entertains. It is the word that defends us from death. It strives to explain the realities of life, to cast light on the most unfathomable and mysterious parts of our being or at least to describe them. Filandon is an ancient dialectical word from Leon of Latin etymology. It is derived from filum or thread taking that name from the nightly gatherings where women sat spinning while everyone told stories.
These were winter gatherings of neighbours congregating in the kitchen, the setting where tales could be told in the warmth of the hearth. We are faced with the remote ancestor and primitive form of what is now known as the literary evening; a celebration of the word as a shaper of society; the origin of popular literary genres. Gathering to tell and listen to those stories about life and the world had a ritual function in the filandones like many of the other comparable traditions from rural communities. These types of narrative gatherings spread almost as archetypes of what narrative represents. Proof of this is reflected in the significant works passed on by successive cultures from Egyptian tales to Latin and Greek tales, from the "Pantchatantra" and the "Somadeva" to "One Thousand and One Nights". The narrative flow which comes from the late Latinate period to the Renaissance ends up pooling in collections like "The Book of Count Lucanor and Patronio", "The Decameron" or "The Canterbury Tales". Narrative gatherings, the attraction of the filandon and the legacy it represents re-emerge throughout the centuries in the most far-flung countries.
Its popular and anonymous heritage left a mark on many authors who are drawn to the tradition in their works and who like to celebrate its compelling allure. The Serapion brethren in the work of Hoffman respond to this call in much the same way that Nikolai Gogol uses the resource in "Dikanka Tales"; so do those friends in Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" who tell a particularly spine-chilling and mysterious ghost story around the fire. There is a guiding principle in the narrative structure of the oral tales of the filandon, which corresponds with the need for expressive efficacy. This remains a characteristic element of the genre's legacy right down to the literary short story. In terms of narrative genres, literary theory considers the tale as the form of fiction that best displays the narrative principle, the primordial model which establishes the fundamental characteristics of its nature. Within the narrative structure, the measure of what is told, its focus and intensity takes on a specific value. These are the elements that we still use to illustrate the modern story and also define another form of story-telling, now very fashionable, known as the micro-story.
The micro-story, the shortest of all stories, is not strictly a contemporary discovery for in the Middle Ages they were already writing very short stories. However, perhaps recently it has been re-born with the intention of seeking an expressive synthesis and narrative concentration, a degree of experimentation and a desire to enlist the reader's collaboration. It has become a very suitable genre for our times where time itself seems more fleeting than ever and there is a certain possibly nostalgic taste for the re-writing of myths. Words in the snow, words of the snow, these are very expressive metaphorical descriptions of the scenery of the filandon. These narrators take on the challenge of what has been called the intimacy born of the cold outside, a kind of indoor atmosphere, a refuge where we protect ourselves from the adversities of life, creating the atmosphere of a story which will root itself in the sensibilities of both those who tell and those who listen. Such narrative is the original primordial memory. This is fiction with all its substantial attributes.
This is the thread of existence, the plot of reality, the effort of the narrative word to contain all the pleasures of invention.
