Thus Were Their Faces

Posted on 11 July 2017 by Silvina Ocampo

An NYRB Classics OriginalSilvina Ocampo is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century s great masters of the short story Italo Calvino once said about her, I don t know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don t show us Thus Were Their Faces collects a wide range of Ocampo s best short fiction and novella length stories from her whole writing life Stories about creepy doubles, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks to a girl, a house of sugar that is the site of an eerie possession, children who lock their perverse mothers in a room and burn it, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman.Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the cruelty of Ocampo s stories was the result of her nobility of soul, a judgment as paradoxical as much of her own writing For her whole life Ocampo avoided the public eye, though since her death in 1993 her reputation has only continued to grow, like a magical forest Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world s finest. New Read Thus Were Their Faces By Silvina Ocampo For Kindle ePUB or eBook – kino-fada.fr This is a book that is going to stick with me for a very, very long time mainly because of the beauty, intense originality, and strangeness of Silvina Ocampo s writing The stories in this book are certainly bizarre and have a way of unexpectedly creeping up on you as you are reading Here you will find an abundance of tales of murder and death in many different, bizarre forms long term resentments that turn into breaking points which materialize in different guises, and there are also stories This is a book that is going to stick with me for a very, very long time mainly because of the beauty, intense originality, and strangeness of Silvina Ocampo s writing The stories in this book are certainly bizarre and have a way of unexpectedly creeping up on you as you are reading Here you will find an abundance of tales of murder and death in many different, bizarre forms long term resentments that turn into breaking points which materialize in different guises, and there are also stories that focus on prophecy and dreams that are also not without their deeper, darker edges Reading strictly for plot here is kind of beyond the point, so readers who have to have every single thing explained are probably going to be lost and will probably not like this book It is yet another work that is a mind stretching experience for people who want to move beyond the norm and who are looking for s...What this gains as a reference work from its scope and depth in drawing from Ocampo s many collections, it loses somewhat as a cohesive reading experience, as a single book Or this may be because my copy came from the library, meaning I couldn t leave as much space to breath between stories as they may deserve In any event she really hit her stride, in content and style, with the collection The Guests, from which the eerie and mysterious title story was drawn Here, the menace of earlier stori What this gains as a reference work from its scope and depth in drawing from Ocampo s many collections, it loses somewhat as a cohesive reading experience, as a single book Or this may be because my copy came from the library, meaning I couldn t leave as much space to breath between stories as they may deserve In any event she really hit her stride, in content and style, with the collection The Guests, from which the eerie and mysterious title story was drawn Here, the menace of earlier stories the vicious little melodramas of The Fury gains the fateful ambience of the classically weird tale, set into a wider surrealist resonance with the world I d actually love to read just The Guests as a since cohesive collection Instead, we get part of it, with lesser examples of Ocampo s craft stretching before and after though the stories of The Fury also seem to form a powerful and cohesive set, here incomplete and earlier novella The Imposter is a Cortazar prefigu...This is what Edgar Allan Poe would sound like if he were a woman living in a posh part of Buenos Aires in the first half of the 20th century A creepy abandoned house, a knife, a gun, melancholy, madness At the same time grassy plains, flamingos, a silv...Silvina Ocampo 1903 1993 , poet and extraordinary teller of tales from Argentina.More than 30 stories collected here, as dark, Gothic, fantastic, imaginative and disturbing as any tales you will ever read And for those who are not familiar with Silvina Ocampo, this NYRB Classic includes an insightful introductory essay by contemporary British novelist Helen Oyeyemi and also a preface by Jorge Luis Borges To share a specifi...3.5 5Thoseinclined towards decadence and less towards roughage will like this collectionthan I The last time I ran through such thickened ichor of narrative was in Ada, or Ardor and mostly forgotten readings of Poe, both of them engaged with during a time when I was bowled overby prose and fancy musings Things probably would have gone better had I taken this slow, but there is a difference between giving the author a measured chance and putting enough space between singular s 3.5 5Thoseinclined towards decadence and less towards roughage will like this collectionthan I The last time I ran through such thickened ichor of narrative was in Ada, or Ardor and mostly forgotten readings of Poe, both of them engaged with during a time when I was bowled overby prose and fancy musings Things probably would have gone better had I taken this slow, but there is a difference between giving the author a measured chance and putting enough space between singular stories to let the overt thematic similarities drain to a tolerable level I believe Report on Heaven and Hell to be one of the best short stories of all time, but when one is talking seven collections and forty two pieces all together, it s difficult for two pages to make up for the other three hundred and fifty.I know she said she didn t read much, but I m getting to get a sense of where Lispector came from Yes yes, wrong country of Lat...Her stories are frequently short, but always cruel She is from a wealthy family who married a handsome writer named Adolfo Bioy Casares This same Bioy Casares was a frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, who in turn published many of his works in a magazine called Sur, whose publisher was her sister, Victoria Ocampo.Silvina Ocampo is a sort of Hispanic Patricia Highsmith, except that she also wrote poetry which now I will have to look into Thus Were Their Faces Selected Stories is a s Her ...Silvina Ocampo Aguirre is one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century, and you paradoxically probably never heard of her This is the problem with translations, writers slipping through the cracks and never making it into English This volume solves this issue and hopefully reveals Ocampo to an English speaking audience which had never sampled her stories Her fiction could be termed Weird literature and will interest the people who leanlit when they read their spe Silvina Ocampo Aguirre is one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century, and you paradoxically probably never heard of her This is the problem with translations, writers slipping through the cracks and never making it into English ...Although I appreciate the skill involved in these strange tales, they don t appeal at the moment, other books seemtempting, and as they re library books I ll switch Some other timeSweet baby Jesus on a piece of toast, Borges wasn t kidding Silvina Ocampo, man This collection of short stories is absolutely incredible Beautiful, surreal and fantastically gothic what s not to loveReview here at The Fanzine in the Ideal Home Noise column.

English
11 July 2017

Silvina Ocampo