Synopsis:
A book of stories by the Mexican writer Jesus Gardea. The stories are part of a sophisticated literature that, in its swiftness and anecdote, runs counter to prevalent literary trends. The stories are marked by repeating elements - a room, a window. Outside, the great exhausting sun, inside, souls, more than characters. They live in an existential world in which the cruelties of chance are the condition of life. Often pursuing absurd activities - moving an unclaimed dresser in a rowboat, clearing a patch of land that nobody wants - they could take as their motto Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." The atmosphere is intimate and strange, swirling, violent. The language is characterized by short, blunt phrases. There is vengeance in almost every case. On finishing Jesus Gardea's stories, one is often unsure exactly what has taken place, or if it occurred in a psychic or physical realm. Gardea's early stories have something in common with Faulkner, Rulfo, Onetti, later stories move away on a path reminiscent of Goya, Kafka, or Bacon, and in his most recent stories, the author enters a strange world that is uniquely his own, that draws nourishment from the arid landscape and cloistered life of northern Mexico, and also from a metaphysical strain that develops in his work. Without question, this ample collection of the author's work encapsulates the least classifiable - and in many aspects the most remarkable - career in Mexican literature.
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