Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2015), Paperback, 336 pages
Description
Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Petroglyph
This is a collection of strange stories. The best word I can think of to describe them is unmoored -- Ocampo seems uninterested in tethering her stories to reality. Dream and reality blend into each other; past memories and future desires are interchangeable; and characterization is nonexistent --
These stories refuse to adhere to the conventions of written prose: Aristotle’s three unities are roundly rejected, as are unity of theme, plot linearity, plot coherence, and whatever other expectation you may bring to them. Dipping into these felt like descending in a barely-coherent dreamworld in which anything out of the ordinary might happen, on the condition that it’s barely sensible.
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characters are so empty and alike that anything that impacts them seems more the result of a choice rather than characterization. And then a desultory choice at best. These stories refuse to adhere to the conventions of written prose: Aristotle’s three unities are roundly rejected, as are unity of theme, plot linearity, plot coherence, and whatever other expectation you may bring to them. Dipping into these felt like descending in a barely-coherent dreamworld in which anything out of the ordinary might happen, on the condition that it’s barely sensible.
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LibraryThing member doryfish
I can see why Helen Oyeyemi likes her work so much.
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
2015
Physical description
336 p.
ISBN
1590177673 / 9781590177679