The Exiles and Other Stories [Paperback]

Quiroga (1878-1937) is considered to be one of the finest short-story writers Latin America has produced, and among the writers there with whom the modern short story begins. This anthology was published in 1987 and contains 13 of his pieces written between 1908 and 1929. It's a companion volume to the Texas Pan American Series' first collection of Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, published in 1976.

The stories in the present collection were all set in the Misiones district of northeastern Argentina. The translator described their worldview as a kind of "creole tragic sense of life," mainly involving men in conflict with nature and other men, struggling to carve out a place in the harsh jungle amid toil, sickness, heat, rain and flood. The introduction stated, "The focus is characteristically Hispanic in that the psychological is far less important than the existential."

Unlike the pieces in the previous collection, these stories omitted the atmosphere of the supernatural, bizarre and dread almost entirely, and included no urban settings. Many were told by a narrator who took part in the story and was a stand-in for Quiroga himself. They lacked the same focus and intensity of the earlier collection. What was foremost was mainly a strong sense of place -- the Misiones jungle -- and the various characters who inhabited it.

Although for me the stories and characters lacked the impact of those in the previous collection, there were interesting passages, such as the description of the narrator's pursuit of a giant snake, the human, animal and natural debris brought downriver by a flood, an ailing father's desperate love for his innocent children, the attempted escape of two contract laborers down a river amid the slow disintegration of their raft, and a narrator's having to photograph a corpse and then revisit his face as he developed the negative. Among the weaknesses of some stories in the present volume, as described by the translator, were the lack of a clear center, either because a story contained too many themes or merely wandered from one incident to the next.

On the subject of Quiroga's relation to magic realism, the translator argued that he and a few of his contemporaries prepared the ground for Borges, Carpentier, Asturias and others by eliminating much of the artificiality and polemical bent of early 20th century Latin American writing, and by moving away from European literary conventions of the time to focus on central aspects of human experience in a native way.

Quiroga's best works approach the level of some stories by Poe or Maupassant, though quite often in my opinion they're closer to atmospheric tales by Bierce and London. His stories that had the strongest impact for me, "The Pursued," "The Decapitated Chicken," "Drifting" and "The Dead Man," were all in the other volume. The present volume might be enjoyed most by those who're looking for more Quiroga and a strong sense of place, a place where "you can't touch a stick of wood that's been left in the sun for ten minutes" and "the earth burns your feet through your boots."

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