Piano Stories

Felisberto Hernández, the Uruguayan composer, pianist, and writer, died in 1964, impoverished and neglected, yet he had stamped his exotic and delicate imaginings on a generation of magical realists, including Garcia Márquez, Cortázar, and Italo Calvino. "My stories have no logical structures," Hernández wrote, and indeed they proceed in a most uncanny fashion. Concatenations of images, skeins of sensations, startling metaphors like raids on the unconscious—these are the pathways through Hernández's fluid and animistic world. People and things, memory and fantasy are form-shifting aspects of one another: a statue stops taking its "role" seriously in order to spend time "playing with the pigeons"; a splashing Italian fountain foretells the astonishing part that water will play in a bereaved woman's life; curtained windows haunt a room as though they were twin maids dressed alike in lace and drapery; a man greets his wife by saying, "I always forget to bring a lens and have a good look at the plants in the greens of your eyes. I know how you get your complexion, though: by rubbing olives in your skin." Though logic is not imposed on his stories from without, there is nothing arbitrary about Hernández's gentle surrealism. These tales unfold with the authority of dreams of childhood reveries, ready at any moment to take over from the rigorous banality we work so hard to enforce. Hernández's ear for the hidden language of the world is always strange and surprising. The delicious secret of his work is here revealed to English-language readers for, amazingly enough, the very first time.