Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy6i7lDGHhE ( )

I distractedly read an anthology of Silvina Ocampo's short stories the year before last (I was really busy at the time and my reading of her stories lacked the continuity I needed to really get an idea of who she was as a writer), and I remembered her name the other day as I was browsing the Argentine section of the library the other day. I got this nice, new edition of Viaje Olvidado, her first book, thinking that rather than reading a broad retrospective of her stories, it would be nice to go back to the beginning and experience her initial artistic expression. I'm very glad I did: I enjoyed these stories greatly, and thought they were a wonderful bridge between two tendencies in Argentine literature that I enjoy: her language was extremely poetic and often attributed human characteristics and actions to inanimate objects, a lot like in the poetry of Oliverio Girondo or the writing of Ricardo Güiraldes (who worked with her sister Victoria in the publication of the literary magazine Sur); on the other hand, many of her stories--episodes might be a better word to describe the texts that make up Viaje olvidado--investigate the enigmas, mysteries and emotions of childhood in a way that reminded me a lot of some of the earlier stories by Cortázar (specifically those in Bestiario and Final del juego). I am glad that I could spend some extended chunks of time reading this book, because I enjoyed it the most when I was able to immerse myself into the series of fantastic and strange anecdotes from the worlds of children and adults.

Of the nearly two dozen stories that make up this book, none is longer than seven pages. Most are between three and six, and narrate single events or chains of related events in the lives of a wide variety of people: children, teachers, doctors, sculptors, and other men and women in Argentina. They are often difficult to unravel: the first story, Cielo de claraboyas, shifts from a description of an upstairs family to an accident on the street without clearly delineating the change in the events. In another story, two girls whose houses border one another slowly swap places, but in the confusion of the transition, their guardian angels do not make a corresponding switch. This leads to tragedy in the future. Many stories do have a fantastic or supernatural bent, but I think it's fair to say that the majority do not. In many cases, these short glimpses back into the past merely question the reality of what the person saw so many years ago. In looking back in time, meaning is sought but not necessarily assigned to events that happened in the past. I thought these evocations of childhood were compelling and relatable to my own feelings when I look back on strange events from my childhood. I remember that two friends and I once stood on the railroad tracks and threw dozens of rocks into my neighbor's pool. We later had to clean the pool up and pay for the repairs. When I think back on it, I try to remember what I felt while I was throwing those rocks, what strange mix of exhilaration, fear and any number of other emotions went through me as I did something so clearly wrong. And, also, why did I do that? Reading some of these stories was something like thinking back on and analyzing that rock-throwing event from my past. In a story called "El pabellon de los Lagos," a girl's childhood trips to the park are recounted, showing her emotions as she goes to a special pavilion and deposits coins into machines in exchange for prizes. Her pleasure as she takes her friend to this pavilion are doubled by the presence of her admired companion, and she goes on to recount her feelings as they stepped back out to the park and remembered the joy of the boat rides they could take in the lake. In the title story, a girl is told different stories about how babies are made and her reasoned organization of these various revealations is recounted.

I read an article a few months ago summarizing a book by the Argentine scholar Carlos Gamerro, which relates the works of Argentine writers such as Ocampo, her husband Adolfo Bioy Cásares, Borges, Cortázar and Onetti under a common tendency toward a "thematic baroque" (http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-4007-2010-10-03.html): "That which characterizes the group made up of Borges, Bioy, Cortázar and Onetti is a specific and baroque manner of constructing plots with the object of provoking a certain vacilation or confusion in the reader with respect to the constitution of reality, a vacilation that doesn't necessarily require the mediation of a supernatural or fantastic event; a system of oppositions and inversions..." I thought this description of a baroque representation of ideas fit Ocampo's chronicles very well. I associate the word "baroque" with the poetry of Góngora and its lexical complexity, which requires multiple readings to unravel the meaning of tangled, hyperbaton-laden sentences. I will need to read many of these stories multiple times in order to fully understand what I think the author is trying to say, and to make sense of the realities that she wishes to represent. I wish I owned this book so that I could do so at my leisure, but at least I have another three months or so before it's due back to the library. On the first read it was delightful: it established a link between multiple elements of Argentine literature that I enjoy, and the emphasis on things that happened far in the past fit well with all the stories by Felisberto Hernández that I've been reading and enjoying lately. ( )