Underground River and Other Stories Book

Releí los doce cuentos de Arredondo y la verdad es que no tienen desperdicio. La autora supo escribir con precisión, pero además escribió sobre temas que pueden parecer evidentes, pero que esconden algo o demuestran una otra dimensión al interior del ser, ahí radica la fuerza de estos textos: en cómo podía escribir sobre incesto, las pérdidas, la importancia del lenguaje, acerca del dolor y de la locura con una profundidad y un giro sin igual en la literatura mexicana.

Ines Arredondo belongs to the generation of Mexicans who began to write in the shadow of what might best be described as tragic realism: a recounting of the Holocaust that was the ten years of the Mexican Revolution. Her solution, like that of many of her contemporaries, was to unanchor literature from the gruesome reality of the novelists who preceded her. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she grew up on a large but decaying family hacienda and used it in her writing. Unlike Garcia Marquez, her impulse to take human foibles to their imaginative extreme is not comic or particularly humane. If anything, her narrators strike me as people who strive to keep a mask of normality in place as their world becomes abnormal. The fierce violence of the Revolution, so central to the previous generation, is mentioned almost in passing in one story. A woman leaves her baby by the side of the river (it is saved), stigmata appear on a wanderer's feet. This volume is a selection, so the themes may not be as overpowering if one reads Arredondo's complete stories, but strange weddings recur and, especially, several old men pursue young women. People who search for psychological development in fiction will be disappointed. The point is not how the narrators or characters react, but the extremity of the situation in which they are placed. There commentary is often pithy but at arm's length from how real characters might react. That seems to be Arredondo's point: the world is so vicious that her characters no longer perceive it as such.