Dazzling, hallucinatory stories by Sara Gallardo, a rediscovered Argentinian contemporary of García Márquez never before published in EnglishThese stunning stories by Sara Gallardo astonish, overwhelm and illuminate. Deeply real, they are also shot through with the supernatural. Every muscular, musical story reveals the way that the habits of everyday life can become unknowable and unpredictable. Recently rediscovered, Sara Gallardo is a major Latin American writer whose stories recall the masters of magical realism - but maintain a domestic, whimsical atmosphere all of their own.
"[Gallardo] shines as a compassionate storyteller." — The National
"The forty-six stories and fragments in Land of Smoke…offer a gamut of lengths, themes and moods… the best are diamantine, intense and violent." — Times Literary Supplement
"[Land of Smoke] is a haunting cornucopia of the strangest fare Southern South America can possibly offer." — Agustin Pico Estrada, Bookanista
"Masterfully crafted short stories… Gallardo's success lies in the unusual twists and turns of her narratives… This collection should be ranked alongside other great works of fiction by Latin American female writers." — Morning Star
"Land of Smoke is my favourite book by one of my favourite Argentinian authors." — Samanta Schweblin, Man Booker International Prize shortlisted author of Fever Dream
"Land of Smoke dazzles in its highly personal language... glowing with the most absolute desperation and the fierce joy of discovering, capturing and sharing the glory of one's experiences." — Leopoldo Brizuela
"Someone who wears different coloured glasses to everybody else." — Mercedes Halfon
"A wonderful collection. It reads like a selection from a lifetime’s work." — 1stReading (blog)
"Sara Gallardo's work possesses such radical originality it would be most appropriate to categorize it with the kind of literature that doesn't seem like anything else, that doesn't even fit the canon of the established heterodoxy, and that will always be read as a discovery." - Martin Kohan
On a January afternoon in London, a reader comes upon a translated collection of stories by an almost-forgotten Argentinian woman writer. He realises he doesn’t have his spectacles with him. Nevertheless, he begins to read the book on his way home. He decides he must read her fictions in their original Spanish, which he finally locates in the university library. But he has to travel to a distant place, and when he returns he finds the university is surrounded by strikers and protesters, and he doesn’t want to cross a picket line.
This
is a trope that might well have appealed to Sara Gallardo, and I
wonder how, with her flair for the unexpected turn, she’d have
concluded the tale. But it’s actually an account of my own
encounter with Gallardo’s stories, and my inability to find them in
Spanish in time to write this piece about her work in translation.
Well, I think as I sit down to write: I’ve read Tanizaki and Kleist
and even the One Thousand and One Nights in translation, so why not
Gallardo? And translator Jessica Sequeira has made a fine rendition
of this collection, with its several sections loosely linked by theme
or motif, and its dazzling switches of narrative mode.
Sara
Gallardo Drago Mitre was born in Buenos Aires in 1931; she was from a
privileged line of landowners and was the statesman Bartolomé
Mitre’s great-great-granddaughter. She started publishing in her
teens. After the death of her second husband, the poet H. A. Murena,
in 1975, she moved to Spain, and, in 1979, wrote her last book, La
rosa en el viento. She died in Argentina at the age of fifty-six.
Literary
lore tells us that El país del humo (Land of Smoke), the complex and
multilayered collection that introduces her for the first time to an
anglophone audience, reads as if it were compiled from a lifetime’s
work; but, first published in 1977, it is also said to have emerged
after the suicide of Gallardo’s husband. Though it bears several
signs of loss and mourning, there is almost nothing here of personal
overflow: grief is turned into metaphor and is only one of the
several aspects of the human (and animal) condition the author
evokes: violence, war, massacres; desire, exile, remorse, and, most
compellingly, lack of fulfilment and the half-lives so many of us
live.
In
one of her stories, “A New Science,” Gallardo refers to a fellow
Argentinian author, Silvina Ocampo, and the publication of her
Epitaphs for Twelve Chinese Clouds in 1942. (Gallardo is often
compared to Ocampo, along with Lispector, but comparisons with Borges
and Cortázar are just as appropriate; in rugged stories, such as the
title piece, set in the mountain ranges of the Andes, Juan Rulfo also
comes to mind. And Gallardo was a generation, or in Ocampo’s case
two, younger than them all.) But the story focuses not on Ocampo or
her texts, but on Arturo Manteiga, a linotypist who studies the shape
of clouds:
It’s
clouds themselves, not the mere factors that form them, that act on
the collective events of humanity. They combine them, decide them,
precipitate them . . . it’s true that clouds result from a
combination of factors. At the same time, clouds are more than these
factors. They possess an essential energy, they make history.
Gallardo’s
meticulous returns to the historical moments in which her texts
unfold rescues her work from the whimsy which some of her Latin
American contemporaries use as a default mode. To return to the story
above, for example, the narrative flashes forward to an interview the
implied author conducts with another cloud-classifier, Claudio
Sánchez, in 1955; and then to the latter’s death in 1975. Towards
the end of the story, in a few terse sentences, Gallardo summons up
mid-twentieth-century Argentina. The narrator concludes: “Like art,
science doesn’t often concern itself with reason.”
Transformed surroundings are often the backdrop of these stories. In “Georgette and the General,” the narrator sees an Eden which is later made into a desert. After the eponymous Frenchwoman is brought to a stately white house by a general, she continues to haunt it from her grave while different regimes come and go, until a mass for the dead and the living allows her to “enter peace,” and the haunted paradise abandons itself. And in the piercingly beautiful “Things Happen,” a pensioner finds himself and the garden carried away by the sea, until:
One day he saw the city of Buenos Aires, wrapped in fog. Chimneys as tall as young girls scattered their smoke messages zigzagging into the fog. A smell of putrefaction, and the city with lit-up buildings was waking, coated in pink . . . of course he cried.
There’s a brief section in the book called “Tasks,” in which, in her characteristic fashion, Gallardo picks up one of her preoccupations from preceding sections: the tasks, often almost Sisyphean, with which we, willingly or by happenstance, occupy our lives. Some of the stories, which span the centuries, are less than a page long, such as the poignant and emblematic “White Flowers:” Juan, whose mother dies just after his birth, is poor; though beautiful, he is considered an idiot. In his old age, working in a parking garage, which he does with care like he does everything, he dies one night, “[s]oftly, in spite of the rain.”
Along with violence and melancholy there’s humour here as well. In “The Caste of the Sun,” a soothsayer has an enigmatic relationship with her sorrel horse, who provides her with hair from his tail for her blonde wig, and very possibly with good counsel too. An entire section deals with animal stories: cats, rats, and, notably, horses. Among them is a prose poem about a lawn, which is cut down one day to clear the way for a king’s visit. But here, too, there’s an epiphany to be found; the dying grass sings of trains, autumn, ice cream and coffee vendors, children, smoke, and rain, echoes of images from other stories.
The very short story, at which Gallardo excels, is a gift to the poet as it makes no necessary demands of narrative muscle (though there is evidence of that, too). However, the longer pieces in the book may raise caveats from lovers of storytelling. The lyrical “The Thirty-three Wives of the Emperor Blue Stone,” narrated by one of these wives, may be compared to the fairy tales of Angela Carter and Leonora Carrington. It blurs the boundary between prose and verse, often veering towards the latter:
I gave myself up to mystery.
What was it?
A path of darkness
To a land that does not exist.
I
am faithful. I persevere.
But
in this story the reader might well feel, after a twenty-page
journey, deprived of the conventional satisfactions that parts of the
narration, and its Perrault-like title, promise. Similarly, the long
tale “Erik Gunnardsen,” embedded in “Daggers,” which
announces itself as the book’s most overtly melodramatic section,
ends with a shocking death for which the enigmatic, stately pace of
the story, which appears like a series of pastel tableaux, does
little to prepare us. (I have often heard the same criticism levelled
at Lydia Davis.) Such feelings of disorientation may well be what
Gallardo deliberately attempts to elicit. But there are times, as in
this story, when the reader has the feeling of being lost in a
vaguely nightmarish dream that doesn’t quite reveal the reason for
its own menace.
Such caveats are inevitable, though, in a collection of this length—nearly three hundred pages and almost fifty texts. There are moments when the reader might wish that some of its sections might have been separately published. But it was evidently the author’s intent to create her own variant of a many-voiced ocean of stories in the manner of the ancients, with facets that echo, reflect, and collide with each other. It’s a massively ambitious, and often successful, task. No one is, after all, under compulsion to read the whole book in one go, though each sequence is probably intended to cohere within itself.
Not
surprisingly, for a collection which centres on the isolated, the
fanatical, or the obsessed, the ultimate section is entitled
“Exiles.” Gallardo is concerned less with the literal meaning of
the term than with varieties of homecoming, as in the exquisite
“Reflection on the Water.” Here Elvira Cabrini, after the loss of
her only son and her last lover, realises that:
the
heart is like a glass, and that when bitterness fills it to the brim,
it overflows in tears.
And
yet this octogenarian prays for, and is granted, a last gift of joy
before dying:
Love burned within her once again.
While he was bathing she went for a walk. She looked at the low clouds like the bellies of marvellous birds brooding over the egg-shaped lake.
The
world revealed itself to her once more.
-
Aamer Hussein
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/sara-gallardo-land-of-smoke/
The short stories and vignettes in your Land of Smoke (2018, tr. Jessica Sequeira. Original: El país del humo, 1977) walk us through the mist of a reality that we can only recognize in dreams. Borrowing from myth and fairy tales, you play with odd points of view – such as those of animals, trains, and even a lawn. Loners, prostitutes, priests, and soldiers inhabit your mists; they are threatened by the force of the elements, they stray into unreality, they lose track; their lives are suffused by some form of violence; they are lonely.
My favourite story in this collection is “Things Happen”. Here, a man lives alone in his house in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. He only has eyes for his garden, even to the detriment of his neighbourhood, where water is scarce. One day, out of the blue, he finds himself swept out to sea: his house and garden had somehow been uprooted, detached from the ground, and were adrift in the middle of the ocean. He is his own island – and one which is slowly eating itself out. His beloved garden crumbles bit by bit over the course of his strange journey, his water supply is dwindling, but, luckily, he still has a reasonable amount of canned food in the pantry. And he can fish.
One day, a castaway appears out of nowhere, grabs the tip of the floating garden, only to drown a minute later – not without leaving behind the imprint of his bewildering glimpse into firm ground. Another day, a sea monster rises from the water, “tall as a hundred trains”, “lifting her body into the air”. It moves, it glances to the infinite sea all around, it goes way.
At one point, the house floats into a sea of ice, braving dense fog, and frozen animals drift past. Birds fly by the house, bringing the hope of dry land. The garden disappears, the windows crack, the house seems to be sinking. “Philosophy germinates from loneliness. And from fear.”
One day, our man sees a line on the horizon – “Land!” – but is unable to let go of his floating house. It moves away, and the coast disappears. “One invigorating exercise for the navigator’s imagination is to mentally paint the abyss below, the depths sheltering mountain ranges; black surroundings, eternal cold. Compared to them, the splashing, the transparency and the light of the surface become pleasant. The precariousness of our suspension is underlined.”
We feel as though we will drift with him forever. But forever is too long a word: his garden will finally break off, the house will be handed over to the swallows, and our man will eventually manage to come back to his street. There will be no water there – as always. And there will be no garden left where had once been his house.
Another story I loved was “A Secret”. A woman keeps a spare head in her closet, and begins a double life in Buenos Aires. She falls in love, manages to convince a man that she is two different women, then relents and confesses her secret to him. “He would always love her. No matter what form she wanted to take. She just had to let him know beforehand.” He not only accepted her secret, but also grew addicted to her: “She had so much to offer.”
Of course, having to let him know run counter her need for transmutation, and she had to find other ways to keep it under control: eating a plastic bag, cleaning the floor with shampoo, “going to a costume party without a costume.” She thinks these are eccentricities that can do no harm, small secrets no one will find out. But, when their child is born, he comes out wrapped in a plastic bag. The father feels betrayed. He leaves them forever. “That’s how a secret is. It wants us alone.”
In “On the Mountain”, an injured soldier gets trapped in a mountain, and is rescued by a man who once belonged to the enemy group. The rescuer later deserted them and now lived as a lone wolf in a cave. They never talk. Sometimes, a beast enters their cave in the middle of the night – and the beast is pregnant. “Look for shelter and you find ice, look for warmth and you step in a bonfire. And so you die in two different ways, and the mountain stays indifferent.”
The soldier and the deserter will have a profound impact on each other. And the beast will humanize them both. A new race will be born. “I meant to wake something in him, I didn’t know well what. Laughter. That’s it, laughter. Which, after words, is the most human thing of all (if you except betrayal). I felt that laughter, a smile, could be the dawn of a word. One word and the wall of his madness could fall.”
“Georgette and the General” is a story that “tells how a good thought transformed an Eden into a desert.” Georgette, a French courtesan, is brought to Argentina by a general, who gifted her with a white house in the countryside. Georgette took great care of her beloved house. Even after death, she continued to haunt the place, to guarantee that it is kept in order. “Floating in the house, she inspected the wardrobes, the remaining flowers. A longing to leave, an anxiety to stay, she hung about uneasily, her fate in limbo. She trembled like the cork on an invisible thread in an invisible water.”
The house took on an abnormal splendour, and Eden lingered on. Time went by. One of the general’s daughters, now eighty, decides to order a mass for the dead and the living. Georgette’s soul can finally experience release. “That blessing fell on her soul. Her uneasiness shattered like a glass. A slit seemed to appear. Through which she slipped.” She abandons her paradise and is put to rest. “The house finally let go. The leaves could move again over the avenues, the gazebo rotted, wasps settled on the chandeliers. The balcony collapsed; it lost its doors. The Eden turned into desert.”
“White Glory” is the name of a white stallion destined to be lonely. He has been sold by his owner and is being transported in a train. An accident happens, the train crashes. Terrified, White Glory battles for his freedom and escapes into the night. “Yes, he went about free. But once again he was alone. How alone, and how free.”
In “Phases of the Moon”, a priest braves a number of dangers in the pampas, only to die while trying to baptize a werewolf. “That’s how terror works: it’s born somewhere, courses like a thunderbolt, touches someone, is lost.” In “The Rats”, the eponymous animals have to struggle against the city’s hostilities to rodents – and do so by impersonating the priest, the newspaper vendor, the warden, and even the grocer. In “Cristoferos”, a statue regrets having discovered the Americas: “I didn’t know what a sad continent I was inaugurating”.
“A New Science” begins with a reference to the publication of Silvina Ocampo’s Epitaphs for Twelve Chinese Clouds, only to move to the story of a pseudoscientist, Arturo Manteiga, who assigned different human events to the shape of clouds. We then follow the birth of a conspiracy theory according to which human affairs were not only influenced, but rather controlled by clouds: “It’s clouds themselves, not the mere factors that form them, that act on the collective events of humanity. They combine them, decide them, precipitate them.” Clouds make history. “Like art, science doesn’t often concern itself with reason.”
I love the way the stories provide the reader with a frame in place, history and time, only to gradually implode that frame, leading us to some kind of impossible dreamscape. As if it were part of a magic trick, you give us a splash of tangible reality, a landscape, even a place in the calendar – only to cover them with your humo and bring a twisted combination out of a cloud of smoke.
Consider the first lines in “The Man on the Araucaria”: “A man spent twenty years making himself a pair of wings. In 1924, he used them for the first time, at dawn. His main concern was the police.” The man manages to fly, but his wings can only lift him as high as an araucaria. He leaves his wife and children, and makes a nest on a tree. Someone calls the police, but our man flies away. “He lives amongst the chimneys of a factory. He’s old and eats chocolate.”
I love how matter-of-factly everything is described, even though we have a feeling that the narrator might be a bit off: “A man spent twenty years making himself a pair of wings. In 1924, he used them for the first time…” His main concern is… the police? Or, as in the first lines of “Doming Antunez”: “I prefer to slit throats, though my marksmanship isn’t bad.“
You play with the gaps in our sense of reality – our fears, our non sequiturs, our foundational myths – not only for comedic effect, but also for a splash in the uncanny. We are left in unsettled ground, but we can never quite point out why, or where, or when everything went out the rails. You bring the ghosts out of our foundational myths, then burn them at the stake – and we are left to translate the smoke signals. It is odd and unsettling. And it is glorious.
Yours truly,
J.
https://theblankgarden.com/2021/02/02/review-land-of-smoke-sara-gallardo/
There are forty-six pieces in Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke.
It doesn’t seem quite correct to describe them all as short stories, since only a handful are of a length, shape and structure that merit the term. The rest are better described as vignettes, sketches, or fragments even. Together they combine historical detail, nods to fairy tales, elements of oral storytelling, and a dash of magical realism.
What comes across strongest though is how compassionate a storyteller Gallardo is, whether it’s in the description of a flawed father who loves his middle children the most – “I sell newspapers for the six of them, coughing in this street I hate, every night until dawn. But if anyone passing sees me smile, it’s because I’m thinking of the middle ones” – or the existence of two loners, both of whom dine in the same restaurant: “their tables were just two cells, two monosyllables solved in a crossword just started.”
It is man’s battle with the natural world, however, that’s the focus of many of the pieces.
On the Mountain, the story with which the collection opens, is set in that “terrible place, the Andean cordillera. Very high up, some mountain range in Peru.” It’s a vista of rocky crags and biting wind, home to condors as large as men. “Look for shelter and you find ice, look for warmth and you step in a bonfire,” the soldier who’s narrating the story, his job being to hunt down the Spanish, explains. “And so you die in two different ways, and the mountain stays indifferent.”
In the later sketch, In the Puna, the narrator describes the arid, high plateau to which he’s been transferred – he’s a head teacher – as a deadly “desert. People in the city like to listen to songs naming it,” he says. “They don’t know oxygen isn’t breathed there, the water boils cold. Children often die on their way to school.”
Meanwhile, in Love, a small, scattered rural community is threatened by “the big rain”, forcing two young women to make a life-or-death escape, vicious wild dogs chasing their cart every mile of their journey to safety through the storm.
So too the protagonist of Things Happen – one of the lengthier and more substantial narrative pieces here – is threatened by the elements.
But whereas the terror in the examples I’ve just given stems from the threat posed by very real inhospitable environments or ecological systems, Things Happen strays into the realm of unreality, some kind of dreamscape even. It begins in Lanus, a district in greater Buenos Aires, where a pensioner spends his days tending his garden.
One day, without warning, he wakes to discover that the plot of land on which his house and garden stand has somehow floated free of terra firma in the night, and he’s now adrift in the middle of an ocean. A terrible ordeal thus unfolds. First he has to contend with the beating heat of the sun and a quickly dwindling fresh water supply.
Days later, as he teeters on the edge of dehydration-induced madness, a fog descends, then the air grows colder and colder and he floats onward into a sea of ice. In a description that’s so incongruously domestic as to be perfectly evocative, great chunks of ice float past our desperate anti-hero, animals frozen inside them “like cherries in aspic”. Although integral to stories like Things Happen and the shorter sketch A Secret, in which a young woman looking for a little excitement uses the “spare head” she keeps in her closet to begin a new double life in Buenos Aires, Gallardo uses magical realism sparingly.
Born in Argentina’s capital city in 1931, Gallardo began publishing in 1958. She was the much celebrated author of newspaper columns, essays, novels, and children’s books, as well as a friend and contemporary of both Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar.
Rather than being a collection of pieces written during the course of her career, Land of Smoke was apparently written after the death of her second husband in 1975, and it’s discernibly steeped in loss; Jessica Sequeira’s beautiful translation – the first English version of Gallardo’s work – capturing a real sense of melancholy, threat and something close to despair.
Let’s also not forget menace, whether from the natural world or in the form of human violence. Take this delicious description of a man: “Something about him reminded you of those wasps that can drag a spider three times their size.”
Or the fragment Red, in which an angry mob – a “vortex” the police are unable to stop – surround a building in which the victims of a violent murderer have been discovered. “Get the killer!” chants the narrator in unison with those around him, the crowd seeing red. “Red on my hands, which I kept hidden as I shouted,” he confesses without warning, vertiginously shifting the reader’s perspective on the scene. “Red as the steel in my pocket.” This particular sketch wouldn’t seem out of place in Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, her use of horror, along with that of fellow Argentine writer and Man Booker International-winner Samanta Schweblin, directly traceable back to Gallardo’s powerful, haunting work. - Lucy Scholes
The work of Sara Gallardo, the late Argentinian author known for her “mythical realism,” has recently been rediscovered. Gallardo was widely published in Argentina beginning in the late 1950s as a journalist and novelist. Land of Smoke, a collection of her short stories, is the first of her books to be translated into English.
Many of the stories in Land of Smoke are short, almost more like vignettes, but one or two pages can span entire lifetimes. “White Flowers” introduces Juan Arias, who was born during a flurry of white flowers raining down on Buenos Aires, but whose sad life story only gets four paragraphs. Gallardo writes, “There’s not much to add about his life,” as if the beautiful white rain shower guaranteed that he peaked on the day he was born.
Most notable of the more traditional short stories are “On the Mountain” and “Things Happen.” These tales are about yielding to an inevitable loss of identity and how one deals with that kind of transformation. In “On the Mountain,” the narrator is taken in by a cave dweller after having a life-threatening accident on an unforgiving mountain, and though their interactions are mostly silent and sometimes cruel, the impact they have on each other is unforgettable.
In “Things Happen,” the protagonist is an unlikable pensioner and former head of personnel who is obsessed with his garden. His refusal to show mercy to other people finally catches up with him, as he awakes one morning to find himself adrift in the ocean—house, garden, and all, but he is completely alone. His survival through heat, bitter cold, and near starvation make him slightly more likeable, or just pitiable, as we watch him learn his lesson. Quite a severe punishment Gallardo gives him, but it serves her point nonetheless.
In fact, many of Gallardo’s stories in Land of Smoke are about those who alter their lives completely to begin journeys for truth. In “Cristóbal the Giant,” the title character decides that he “wasn’t born for this” (a normal life) and leaves his home to seek a higher purpose for the strength he’s been given. In “White Glory” a white stallion escapes from his master and battles for his freedom, finding spiritual meaning in his string of hardships. As Gallardo opens the story: “Dapple-white horses can be bland or they can be the glory of the world.”
The stories usually end with an abrupt twist. Gallardo always makes her purpose known this way. She writes with an air of authority (which Jessica Sequeira has translated from Spanish brilliantly) that begs your trust when she writes that trains can dream or that horses can murder. That lions kept in a zoo can seek their own paradise. That rats can plot a city takeover. While she does refer to specific dates at times—the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1940s—the detailed settings and the depths of human experience (even when characters are not human) remain timeless.
In these stories, forty-six in total, Gallardo’s succinct descriptions define the tangible—the weather, the landscape, the physical circumstances—while her plots are fantastical. The former grounds the latter, making anything seem possible. - Meredith Boe
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/07/18/land-of-smoke-sara-gallardo-review/
‘Land of Smoke‘ is a collection of short stories. It was originally published in Spanish in 1977. It has 46 stories. Some of them are short shorts, sometimes they are just a page long, while others are a bit long at around 20 pages. The book is divided into sections, with stories under the same theme grouped together. For example, there is a section where nature – mountains, seas, clouds – plays a big part. There is a section in which the stories are about animals, there is a section about horses, another about trains. I loved this arrangement – it was quite interesting.
I loved the book overall. But I loved some of the stories more than the others. Here is a brief description of some of my favourites.
On the Mountain – This is the first story in the book. A soldier is trapped in a mountain in the middle of a battle. He is injured and he can’t walk. He is saved by another man, who seems to be living there. This strange man, doesn’t talk. Or he doesn’t want to talk. What happens after that? Does the soldier recover? Does this host who saves him talk to him? Who is this stranger who lives in the mountain? And what is this beast which sometimes knocks at their cave in the middle of the night? You have to read the story to find out.
Georgette and the General – A general who goes to Europe, comes back with a French girl, who is his lover. He builds a separate house for her in the middle of nowhere, and visits her often. He is married and has his own family with whom he lives elsewhere. This French girl’s name is Georgette. What happens to Georgette for the rest of her life, forms the rest of the story. It is beautiful, poignant and heartbreaking.
Things Happen – A man who lives in a particular street has a beautiful garden which is the envy of his neighbours. One day morning he wakes up to the sound of water drops hitting his house’s windows. He thinks it is raining. But when he walks to the window to see what is happening, he discovers that his whole house with the garden is floating in the middle of the ocean. Our man thinks that he is either dreaming or he is having a hallucination. So he goes back to sleep. But when he gets up there is no change. His house is still floating in the ocean and the waves are spraying water drops on his windows. It is unbelievable. How did this happen? Is the man able to get off the ocean onto solid land? You should read the story to find out.
But on the island – Two cats explore the city and they end up in the zoological park. There they discover their cousins, the bigger cats the lions. They slowly start understanding the lions’ language. And one day they help one of the younger lions to escape. Are these three – two small cats and one big one – able to enjoy their freedom and live happily everafter? The rest of the story tells us what happened.
A Lawn – We see the world through the eyes of a lawn and it is incredibly beautiful. I cried when I read the last lines of the story.
White Glory – White Glory is one of the great horses of his time, but his master sells him off. While being transported in a train, there is an accident, and White Glory ends up in the wild. What happens after that is glorious and White Glory is magnificent.
Cristóbal the giant – Cristóbal is a giant-sized person who is also innocent and simple. He wants to find a master to serve. One day he meets a general and requests to serve him. The general gives him an impossible task. What happens after that and the way Cristóbal discovers new things about life forms the rest of the story.
White Flowers – A one-page story which describes the life of a normal, everyday person. Very fascinating.
The
Great Night of the Trains – There are trains which are put out of
service and are abandoned near the tracks. What people don’t know
is that these trains have their own lives and personalities and
memories and dreams. One day, these abandoned trains all get together
and decide to rebel. What happens after that is the rest of the
story. It gave me goosebumps.
A Loner – A restaurant closes down. Most people, both the customers and employees, move on. But it affects some of the customers, who are introverts and loners and reclusives, quite deeply. What they do about it forms the rest of the story. This story is a beautiful love letter to solitude and to introverts and reclusives and it stands up there with Emily Maguire’s essay ‘Solitude is Bliss‘. I loved this story so much.
I loved ‘Land of Smoke‘. One of the descriptions of the book is that it is hallucinatory. I think that is a perfect description of the book. I loved the way how sometimes nature plays a bigger role in the story than the human characters. I also loved the way how Sara Gallardo has sometimes told a story from an unusual perspective, making us see the world in new ways – for example, from the perspective of the lawn, the horse, the abandoned trains – it is fascinating. This is a book to be read slowly, lingered on and savoured. I am glad that I discovered a new Argentinian writer who has become one of my favourites now. I can’t wait to read my next Sara Gallardo book.
I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
From ‘Things Happen‘
“When watering his garden, how many times had he enjoyed watching the ants struggling in the currents from his hose? Now he thought of them differently. Supposing for a moment a sea god actually existed, the Neptune of the ancients the boy joked about on television, wouldn’t he get the same pleasure directing men and their boats as he had spinning the insects, occasionally saving some because of their beauty or harmlessness, in a momentary good mood? Harmless or beautiful from whose point of view? The gardener’s. But doubtless there were others.”
From ‘Phases of the Moon‘
“It also isn’t pleasant to change horses just like that. A horse is someone you get used to, someone who gets used to you. But to arrive at a human settlement and get permission to leave the tired horse, choose another and free it when you reach your destination because it can return home on its own, is an impediment to the heart’s affection. You can’t even get used to a horse.”
From ‘The Thirty-Three Wives of Emperor Blue Stone‘
“Old age is a drunkenness. I’ve lost my teeth but influence nourishes me. I plait my white hair. What would be plaited without me?”
“I gave myself up to mystery.
What was it?
A path of darkness
to a land that perhaps does not exist.
I am faithful. I persevere.”
From ‘An Embroiderer‘
“He told a colleague that as a young man, he had embroidered cloth. But that now there was no difference between the embroiderer and the embroidered, that when embroidering he was embroidered, that the embroidery embroidered him and he the embroidery.”
From ‘A Loner‘
“Ever since he was young, Frin had invested all the effort many use to get a good job into the opposite, avoiding one.” - Vishy
Illusions and ghosts populate Sara Gallardo’s stories, collected here in Land of Smoke. These are tales in which a dream come true—a cozy retirement among the flowers; the ability to fly—is apt to quickly become nightmarish, and in which the connections that people yearn for most, when realized, often lead to their quick undoing.
Atmospheric details capture ice floes, desolate caves, and plains over which the wind whips and bites; the specter of the familiar slopes through scenes that seem ordinary at first glance but that then prove to be darker, edgier, and more expansive than expected. Gallardo’s human characters are at their most vivacious when they tend to their animal sides, and her animals have rich lives and needs that become a cellular-memory pulse across generations. Monsters may appear but then prove to be benign—it’s the quiet ones that you have to watch out for.
Stories vary in length. Some are microfiction; some wind on through many pages. “Things Happen” is a surrealistic standout that becomes both more uncanny and more sympathetic as it progresses; tales like “Even” and “That One” manage their horrors and fairy tales in under a page. Some stories, like “Cristóbal the Giant,” are imaginative etiologies that locate the nexus of natural beauty in deep, visceral need; others, like “Georgette and the General,” are entirely, achingly human.
Characterizations play upon darkness and desire. One man coldly kills others to get even with life; a husband laments a missed opportunity to murder his wife; a killer gleefully hides among those sent to catch him; a mother freely admits that she loves two of her children best. Redemption may have a religious edge, but that’s often more about convenience than actual belief. At all turns, these stories are unsettling, surprising, and unmissable. Land of Smoke is a bountiful collection of short stories, full of sharp edges, odd magic, and unexpected allure. - Michelle Anne Schingler
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/land-of-smoke/
Sara Gallardo, Eisejuaz
In 1968, the Buenos Aires-born writer and journalist Sara Gallardo travelled to the small town of Embarcación in Salta, a province in the north-west of Argentina. There she met and interviewed Lisandro Vega, also known by his indigenous name Eisejuaz. Lisandro Vega was a notable representative of the Wichí community living in the Evangelical Mission La Loma founded by Scandinavian Protestants. The immediate result of this encounter was an anthropological article published in the newspaper Confirmado under the title The Story of Lisandro Vega. Three years later, the novel Eisejuaz came out, with the fictionalised version of Lisandro Vega as its protagonist and first-person narrator. The Eisejuaz imagined by Sara Gallardo has proved to be one of the most original and profound characters in Latin American literature. It has taken a while for the readers and critics to catch up with the significance of the novel, which is now regarded in Argentina as a literary classic, and its recent reissue by the independent Spanish publisher Malas Tierras will hopefully get it more readers and admirers in Europe.
For the duration of the novel, we inhabit the subjectivity of Eisejuaz, who, by integrating the religious dogmas taught to him at the Mission with his indigenous beliefs, has become a kind of Christian shaman. He talks to the Lord through angels or messengers that come to him from the natural world. Animals, trees, and even the air speak to him occasionally to impart divine revelations. Only once does God himself talk to him directly. It happens when Lisandro is 16 years old and works as a dishwasher at a hotel. The Lord manifests himself in the little whirlpool of soapy water going down the drain in a kitchen sink and brings the young Eisejuaz the message which will determine the course of his life: “Lisandro, Eisejuaz, your hands are mine, give them to me.” As it becomes apparent after a series of communications through the messengers, the main character’s predestination is to take care of one special person sent into his path by God, and this period of caretaking will prove the last important event in his life. At the age of thirty-five, Eisejuaz stumbles upon the helpless body of a white man lying in the mud. The man, whose name is Paqui, has been paralised due to an unspecified reason. The Wichí protagonist believes that Paqui is the chosen one to whom he has to give his hands at God’s behest and brings the man to his home. He will be feeding, washing, and looking after Paqui in all possible ways for three years, which will result in his complete alienation from the local indigenous community and the clergy at the mission. Although rousing sympathy because of his lamentable state, Paqui is hardly likeable. Before the accident, his main occupation was getting the indigenous women working at a sugar factory drunk and shearing their hair, which he later sold to barber shops. Paqui is far from grateful to Eisejuaz for his selfless care: every day he hurls abuse and mockery at his “saviour” and even manages to seduce his mistress Mauricia. Stoically, Lisandro Vega bears Paqui’s taunts and insults despite the occasional impulse to crush his head (the protagonist is extremely strong) because he has no choice but to fulfil the mission entrusted to him by God. In Eisejuaz’s figurative language, the benevolence of God is symbolised by the hammocks hung in his heart by the Angels, so they can stay in it with due comfort. These metaphysical hammocks find their earthly reflection in the hammock used by Lisandro to carry Paqui every day on his back: the benevolence and the burden become inseparable.
Just
like Eisejuaz has to make a bigger picture of God’s will out of the
messages communicated by a host of his angels such as the lizard, the
rococo toad, the jaguar, the rhea, the brocket, the Chaco chachalaca,
and others, so the reader has to piece together a coherent story out
of the disjointed and impressionistic narrative coached in a highly
idiosyncratic Spanish, which is the second language of the
protagonist. The abrupt flashbacks and lack of conventional
signposting make the novel confusing to the first-time reader, and
the fact that some key information is revealed in casual and
misleadingly forgettable statements makes Sara Gallardo’s work even
more challenging, and, at the same time, more exciting to anyone who
wants to get to the crux of the matter. We also have to remember that
the mind of the narrator telling us this non-linear and rambling
story is occasionally subject to the influence of mind-altering
substances, which Eisejuaz consumes to facilitate his communication
with the messengers. In most cases, the spiritual contact is
established by smoking a mixture of tobacco and the crushed seeds of
the Cebil tree or Anadenanthera Colubrina, which contain the
psychoactive alkaloid bufotenin. For example, it is thanks to the
smoking ritual administered for him by his older friend Vicente
Aparicio that Eisejuaz coaxes the angels back into his heart with
their hammocks after a long and painful period of their absence.
However, smoking the hallucinogenic seeds is not the only way for
Lisandro Vega to pursue his shamanistic practices. We find this out
when he drinks unadulterated alcohol in order to heal a little girl
whose father believes that her sudden illness is the result of
Eisejuaz’s curse.
Wherever we follow the protagonist, we encounter violence in different forms and shapes. It has been part of Eisejuaz’s world since early childhood. In a disturbingly bland manner, he recounts the nasty, teeth-shattering fight between his mother and another woman from their tribe as well as the brutal battering of his wife, which leads to her death. Most of the time, the omnipresent violence is portrayed in a low-key manner, but there is at least one episode in which little is spared to the reader. Lisandro Vega is not the narrator, but the listener this time. He sits through a horrible story of a Wichí woman he will later identify as the personification of Vengeful Death, which is a mere defensive reaction on his part, for he witnessed some of the recounted events as a child, but chose to forget them. The main shock comes not only from the casual way in which the woman tells the hair-raising story of the murder and mutilation inflicted by the members of hostile tribes to one another, but also from the fact that the reader is totally unprepared for this sudden intrusion of graphic gore. When I reached this watershed moment in the book (and it is placed roughly in the middle) I was weirdly reminded of Gaspar Noé’s movie I Stand Alone, in which the provocative director inserted a warning with a countdown before a particularly bloody scene: “ATTENTION: you have 30 seconds to leave the screening of this film”. My immediate thought was that Sara Gallardo should have included a similar warning in the book.
In a parodic imitation of a hermit saint’s hagiography, Eisejuaz withstands what he calls the five temptations, (i. e. the five attempts by people he knows to persuade him to return to normal life) and, after a prophetic dream, withdraws into the wilderness of the primeval forest dragging along a cart with some clothes, tools, kitchen utensils and a helpless Paqui. There they live for some time in the idyll of secluded communion with nature and God, in the company of a monkey, a talking parrot and a dog. At least that is how Lisandro views his return to the familiar environment of his childhood dictated by the will of the higher powers. For Paqui, who is forced to eat snakes and endure the harshness of life in the selva, their escape from society is more like abduction, which is why as soon as their camp is discovered by a group of hunters he gets them to carry him back to town. Yet there seems to be no escape for either of them as they are destined to be reunited several years later, so the divine providence is fulfilled. After a stint as a charlatan healer gathering ecstatic crowds in the towns and villages of Salta, Paqui, like the prodigal son, will return to his benefactor to stay with him until the end.
The most obvious question that is likely to occupy the thoughts of the reader when the book is finished is “who is Paqui?” Does this character serve as a heavy-handed symbol of the burden of white colonialism weighing on the shoulders of the aboriginal man? Is he Eisejuaz’s sinister double, a materialised aspect of his personality? Or maybe he is just a foil to his companion’s idealistic nature: yet another version of Sancho Panza or Lamme Goedzak? I have to admit that I haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. I don’t know the real significance of this thoroughly immoral yet oddly sympathetic character. I am more inclined to view him as just a victim of the circumstances, an unwilling cypher that acquires a meaning only after Eisejuaz inscribes in him, as it were, the message drawn from the syncretic semiotics of his Christian shamanism. And the fact that Paqui ultimately finds his way back to his caretaker, seemingly on his free will, as though reconciled with his place within the cosmos of the indigenous man, is the best proof of the power contained in that message even if we are unlikely to comprehend its true meaning.
Update: It turns out there is a German translation of the book, done by Peter Kultzen. So, if you can read German, there is nothing preventing you from spending some time in the splendid and terrifying world of Eisejuaz.
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2021/02/04/eisejuaz-by-sara-gallardo/
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