While her collaborator and fellow Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges created fantastical worlds, Ocampo infected the recognisable with strangeness and cruelty
In 1940 a book was published in Buenos Aires that drew together a vast array of fantastic tales, from Petronius and Pu Songling to Edgar Allan Poe and Kafka. Its editors were three Argentinian bibliophiles: Silvina Ocampo, her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, and their best friend, Jorge Luis Borges. All three were gifted creators, as well as aficionados, of the fantastic. The extraordinary worlds Borges created are famous, and Bioy’s mysterious islands, particularly the one described in his novel The Invention of Morel, are relatively well known. Far less trodden, however, are the forking pathways of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction.
The stories collected in The Book of Fantasy, in Daniel Balderston’s translation, range from ghost and horror stories to mysteries with twist revelations, to the more deeply and less explicably strange. Similarly, Ocampo’s stories – 154 of them across seven collections published between 1937 and 1988 – describe a line that begins in 19th-century-style horror and moves through a phase of formal inventiveness, before entering the unique, disturbing fantastical atmosphere of her mature period: a world where strange events overwhelm mundane bourgeois reality, where motives are obscure, and where a great cruelty presides over life. Ocampo, by all accounts a pleasant, playful person, and despite possessing a gift for humour, nevertheless enjoyed her work’s reputation for cruelty. In 1980 she told an interviewer that her work had been denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because it was “too cruel”. Later in that decade, when she was working with the translator Daniel Balderston on her first collection in English (a language into which two-thirds of her stories remain untranslated), she insisted, he writes, “that we choose her cruelest stories”.
Ashamed, I slunk like a shadow through the streets of the town following that horrid woman. The streets seemed more twisting and ominous to me, infinite and at every step filthier, as if winding through a swamp.
She should stand up,” the guests said.
An aunt objected: “And if her feet come out wrong?”
Related: Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo review – dark, masterly tales
In one of the windows I saw, for my sins, the woman who later became my fiancée embracing my rival … Later, when I lived through these events, the reality seemed a little faded to me, and my fiancée perhaps less beautiful.
After these experiences, my interest in living what was destined for me diminished.
I tried to combat these absurd manias. I made her see that she had a broken mirror in her room, yet she insisted on keeping it, no matter how I insisted that it was better to throw broken mirrors into water on a moonlit night to get rid of bad luck. She was never afraid if the lamps in the house went out all of a sudden; despite the fact that it was definitely an omen of death, she would light any number of candles without thinking twice. She always left her hat on the bed, a mistake nobody else made.
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