![]() ![]() “Family Portrait” shifts rapidly between various points of view. “Our Dead World” ends in a line of verse neither that story nor “Story with Bird” ends with a period, never mind a complete sentence. As soon as you’ve found a foothold in Colanzi’s world, her rules of engagement will suddenly shift. There is no way to predict what is coming. In story after story, the everyday ends up merging, one way or another-by sloping gently or by veering suddenly-with the otherworldly or the absurd or the untethered or some combination of these. In “Story with Bird,” a disgraced surgeon hides out on a country estate run by slave labor. In “Cannibal,” a man waits for his drug-trafficking girlfriend in a Paris bar. It’s a telling moment in what is anything but a conventional collection of stories. Then, suddenly, “the hall, people, coffin, flowers, our own astonished bodies, everything levitated in a single iridescent shaft of light.” So ends “Alfredito,” the second story in Colanzi’s ( Permanent Vacation, 2010) latest book. ![]() “Elsa, I asked as she braided my hair, where do the dead go? The dead never go, she answered me, her mouth full of bobby pins.” At the funeral, the girl and her classmates gather before the coffin. “The funeral is at seven,” her mother says, instructing Elsa, the family’s nanny/maid, to have the girl ready by then. ![]() The real and the unreal merge in this latest collection by a young Bolivian writer.Ī young girl discovers that a schoolmate has died of an asthma attack. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |