Piano Stories kindle Å Paperback read Ì felisberto hernández

> Piano Stories

text Piano Stories

Piano Stories kindle Å Paperback read Ì felisberto hernández ✓ ❴BOOKS❵ ✮ Piano Stories Author Felisberto Hernández – Gym-apparel.co.uk Inhabited by rich eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes this collection of short stories deeply influenced a genLy influenced a generation of magical realistsIf I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950 I would not be Oh Felisberto I'm baffled All this talk of you being a fabulist and a magician and loved by Maruez and Cortazar and Calvino All these reviews on Goodreads and all this talk about your surrealism and not one word about your greatest least fabulist story of all The Stray Horse One of the best stories I've ever read by anyone Yes there is less of that fabulist aesthetic It's there but it's so much uiet and subtle and the story ambles along without any sort of premise The deliciousness of this story the meditative tone and the way you bring the characters and small minor trivial events to bigger than life is magical already and I still can't figure out why your other stories never connected with me in the same way or why nobody talks about this one Maybe because this story doesn't involve fantastic imagery the way I see it the other stories had fantastic imagery as part of the content of the story whereas this one showed you the reality of life while letting you peak almost as if under the skirt of the furniture so to speak into the abundant imaginary and secret life that flourished beneath it It's still fabulist but in this way that multiplies through implicationThe story is divided into 2 sections The first is remembrances Nothing really happens and nothing unusual happens But so much clarity and emotion is in each line you can feel the significance of each nothingness It's wonderful And in parts funny too The second section is a rumination on the multiplicity of the self the idea of growing up and becoming a different person and the impossibility of memory This second part is great but it does get a little repetitive and even over reaches towards the end but I can forgive it that since it is such a masterpiece of a storySince it was winter night came early But the windows had not seen it come in they had gone on absently gazing at the clear sky until the last bit of light faded The night floated up around our legs from under the furniture where the black souls of the chairs grew and spread Soon the white slip covers were uietly suspended in the air like small harmless ghosts Suddenly Celina would rise light a small lamp on a coil and attach it to the candleholder on the piano When my grandmother and I lit up in the light it was like being in a blaze of bright hay Celina would make me spread my hands on the keys and with her fingers she bent mine back as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs She was closely in touch with my hands than I was myself When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight giving each object a new charm Meantime I would be watching for signs of affection and hiding in the bushes that I assumed would line the road leading to her Besides if she had the feelings I thought she had she would see into my silence and guess my wish I couldn't help trying to imagine what such a stern person would be like when she softened and yielded to someone she loved Perhaps her gnarled hand the one with the scar on it would be capable of a gentle caress in spite of the thick black sleeve stretching down to her wrist Perhaps the whole scene would take on the beauty and charm of the objects around us when struck by the sounds rising from the piano Perhaps caressing me she would bend forward as she did to light the lamp and meantime the piano like an old man half asleep wouldn't mind holding the la

kindle Ó Piano Stories â Felisberto Hernández

Inhabited by rich eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes this collection of short stories deep I wrote a lazy review What can I say? It started like thisAt his best Felisberto Hernandez astonishes He has a way of seeing From that stems his charm his magic his aura His gaze penetrates the core of things Sometimes it strips apart the story that encloses it – the story another object that the gaze penetrates – and the fractious shards of mirror effect of the exploded vessel becomes the story ‘His gaze penetrates the core of things’? It interrogates draws new cores from things makes things over for new purposes When in ‘The Flooded House’ he says ‘Then suddenly she saw a fountain – and it was as if she had met a face that had been watching for her’ we are somewhere both familiar and new Then he saysShe went on seeing it inside her own eyes then it seemed she and the water were both contemplating the same object – so she could not tell whether a premonition she had later had come to her from depths in the water or in her soulAfter inversions – the fountain turned this way and that in the light of his thought – he says ‘ and when she got back in bed she felt real tears at long last falling on her nightgown’ That this passage involves a woman who having suffered the sudden loss of her husband chooses to live in a house literally flooded with water by a creative architect leads us to consider water as reflector and repository of grief More as I read this in the sun sparkling back garden with a glimpse of river backwater through the trees I stopped to wonder why so many people are drawn to water in general Precisely because Felisberto whispered of this face that watches for them Reflection distortion; water seems to have been created to facilitate metaphor So to the core of things – the new core uncoveredBack to the lazy reviewNot all of these stories pleased me In ‘The Daisy Dolls’ he tries something different third person plot driven conceptual and the result is dry programmatic But some of them ‘The Stray Horse’ ‘The Two Stories’ ‘The Woman Who Looked Like Me’ were so good they threatened my entire ratings system moved the goalposts Difficult to read – certain sentences needed untangling before I could decipher them – but these mental contortions were medicinal freeing up new portions of my mind for blood to flow through‘The Stray Horse’ Now that’s a story A story almost not a story Memory interrogated torn apart reconfigured Halfway through it he saysSomething unexpected has happened and I’ve had to interrupt my story For days now I’ve been at a standstill Not only am I unable to write but it’s a great effort for me to live in the present to live forward In the end I had lost even my desire to write And as it happens this desire was my last tie to the present But before this tie came loose the following occurred I was uietly enjoying one of those nights of the past Although I had been stepping slowly like a sleepwalker suddenly I tripped over the wisp of an idea and fell into a moment full of events The place into which I’d fallen was like an irresistible centre of attraction where a number of muffled secrets lying in wait for me seized and tied down my thoughts and it has been a struggle ever since‘Mental contortions’ follow The author narrator splits in two meets his double I was thinking the ‘someone’ in the back of the room communicating over my shoulder with my memories must have been this partner of mine who was speculating with those mem

Felisberto Hernández â Piano Stories kindle

Piano StoriesThe writer I am today Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life Gabriel Garcia Maru The weird world of Uruguayan fantasist Felisberto is like one of his book flaps states a look into slightly different but parallel dimension oddball humor meets phantasmagorical prose Bizarre sketches etched with autobiographical authenticity that resemble Proust's capturing of time and memory automatic writing of the surrealist school and the goofball antics of silent film comedy The highlights are definitely Daisy Dolls and The Flooded House The former takes place in weird house next door to a mysterious factory and filled with eccentric servants mirrorswhich one of the characters is terrified of and lifelike human size dollssome in display cases acting out scenes which reminds of Raymond Rousell's Locus SolusIt is a full plunge into a world of erotic pathos and and very bizarre ideas The missing link between Hoffman's The Sandman and Landolfi's Gogol's Wife The latter is another odd dream were a possibly blind obese women has an author slowly paddle her around her designed flooded house where she occasionally holds her own wake and waxes eccentricities about the nature of water Other stories feature men who think they are horsesushers whose eyes glow in the dark companies that inject commercials into you by syringe and a woman who can never leave her balcony