Penguin, 2004, 173 p. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

This is a collection of the author’s short stories most published from 1948-1953 but some from the 1960s and one from 1970. His characteristic magical realism is to the fore but so too is an emphasis on death.

Lead story The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother is the longest in the book. Eréndira starts off as a young teenage girl (prone to falling asleep on her feet while going about her business) whose widowed grandmother blames her for her house burning down. In order for Eréndira to repay her for her loss the grandmother pimps her out. Various travels ensue among which she procures a certificate of purity from a bishop. Eréndira forms a relationship with Ulises, son of a native mother and a Dutch trader who smuggles diamonds grown inside oranges.
The Sea of Lost Time is a prime example of magical realism, mixing a strange smell coming off the sea with the arrival of the richest man in the world who turns up with suitcases bulging with money which he dispense to the locals who nevertheless end up in debt to him and a swim (without artificial breathing aids) to the bottom of the sea where there is a village.
The first sentence of Death Constant Beyond Love, “Senator Onésimo Sánchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life,” (written in 1961) predates that of Márquez’s most famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” which I commented on here. In this story though the character mentioned in the sentence does feature strongly in the tale.
The Third Resignation tells of a child who has seemingly died but is kept alive by intravenous feeding and housed in a coffin-shaped box.
The Other Side of Death gives us the thoughts of a man whose twin brother’s dead body lies embalmed in the next room.
Eva is Inside Her Cat is the tale of a woman insomniac who imagines herself into the body of her cat.
Dialogue with the Mirror contains the thoughts of a man who sees himself in the mirror, shaving. Or is it himself?
The Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers is that the woman who has occupied the house they sleep in has died.
Eyes of a Blue Dog are the words two people who dream of each other swear they will use in daytime to recognise each other.
The Woman who Came at Six O’Clock relates a conversation, encompassing love and murder, between a restaurant owner and the woman who always comes into his establishment at six o’clock. Except she insists that this day she was early.
Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses seems to be narrated by a ghost, who waits for the woman who came to live in the room next door to have her Sunday siesta before moving some of the roses she sells to the knoll where his grave lies.
The Night of the Curlews features three men whose eyes have been pecked out by curlews. Though their story had been in the newspapers people don’t believe it.

Pedant’s corner:- Ulises’ mother (Ulises’s,) a bandoleer (bandolier,) martyrized (x 2, martyred,) her virtures (her virtues.)

faber and faber, 1987, 252 p. Translated from the Spanish Pantaléon y las visitadoras. No translator named.

Llosa may have intended this to be a light-hearted piece of fiction. (Then again perhaps not; there are several deaths in it.) It may have been taken so in the 1970s when it was first published but I doubt the book’s premise would be viewed with much favour were it to be submitted to a publisher nowadays.

Because the soldiers posted (in effect “up the jungle”) to Iquitos, driven to distraction by the heat and conditions, are causing havoc among the local women, raping them left, right and centre – even in the street in full daylight – Army Captain Pantaleón Pantoja is given the unusual task of organising a service to prevent this. This is the SSGFRI, the Special Service for Garrisons, Frontier and Related Installations. In effect he is to procure women to provide for the sexual release of the soldiers on an organised basis. But all this is to be done in secret, he must not wear his uniform; the women, though in reality Army employees, are to be unofficial, without rank, though the service will have an identifying colour scheme, red and green, worn as a badge by the “specialists” and displayed on the trucks, boats and single aeroplane the service will have at its disposal.

Pantoja’s wife, Pochita, is at first delighted by his apparent promotion but her disappointment with their new quarters, not, of course, in the army compound but instead a very old, very ugly, very uncomfortable house in town, not at all comparable to the poorest one on the base, is profound. She is doubtful, too, of the increased sexual interest Pantoja has for her (stimulated by the heat and conditions of their new surroundings) though pleased to become preganant with their first child. Pochita’s ignorance of Pantoja’s true activities, despite his associations with shady characters, is sustained for a while but is eventually lifted when a specialist fired for misconduct writes to her.

Being an Army man, Pantoja of course treats the job with military punctiliousness, engaging surveys into the length of time each “service” will require, hence determining the number of specialists to be recruited, and itemises the amounts to be docked from the pay of the service’s users. Due to his logistical skills he makes a great success of everything; so much so that demand for his specialists increases – to the Navy and beyond.

In the meantime a heretical sect known as The Brotherhood of the Ark, led by a Brother Francisco, whose adherents’ trade-mark practice is the crucifixion of animals and birds, is gaining followers in the region. Despite all the authorities’ efforts to arrest him Brother Francisco remains elusive. The intersection between Francisco’s cult and the activities of the SSGFRI provides th enovel’s turning point.

The story is told through conversations, the texts of military dispatches, letters from and to Pochita, transcripts of local radio broadcasts and extracts from newspaper reports. The “normal” text has an unusual flavour, as different conversations are interleaved with each other on the page, with only a paragraph break to signal any change to and from each discussion. This initially has the efect of obstructing the story’s flow but is soon accustomed to.

Sensitivity warning. One of the characters, an inhabitant of the demi-monde whom Pantoja employs to help him with his mission, is called Porfirio Wong, but is also given the soubriquet the ‘Chink.’

Pedant’s corner:- supervisers (supervisors,) a capital letter on the next word following a colon – but not in every instance of a colon, a line repeated on the next line (x 2,) smoothes (smooths,) “the lay of the land” (the lie of the land,) Collazos’ (Collazos’s,) Manaos (this Brazilian city is usually spelled Manaus,) Iquitos’ (Iquitos’s,) “consults with his adjunct” (that military functionary in English is called an adjutant,) “‘he’d of died of sorrow’” (does this illiterate solecism exist in Spanish? The correct English form is ‘he’d’ve’.)

and The Gold of the Tigers, Penguin Modern Classics, 1987, 190 p, including Author’s Note, two Prefaces and Notes.
The Book of Sand was translated from the Spanish El libore arena (published by Emecé Editores SA 1975) by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. The Gold of the Tigers – a selection of poems from The Gold of the Tigers (published as El oro de los tigres by Emecé Editores SA 1972) and The Unending Rose (published as La rosa profunda by Emecé Editores SA 1975) were both translated by Alastair Reid.

In all of the tales in this collection there is an economical sparseness to the prose, a distancing, which tends to make them read like myth, or fable. They are certainly flavoured with the fantastic. The typical style is to tell rather than show. But in Borges’s hands it works. In his preface to The Unending Rose Borges says, “the notion of art as compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral.” He’s underselling himself. He knew perfectly well what he was doing.

A strange meeting is the nub of The Other. In Cambridge in 1969, by the Charles River, Jorge Luis Borges encounters Jorge Luis Borges, who is in Geneva in 1918, a few steps from the Rhone.
In Ulrike, a Colombian man has an encounter with a Norwegian woman in York. Their walk together leads them into a different time.
The Congress is the Congress of the World, an organisation set up to represent the men of all nations, whose President is Alejandro Glencoe, Uruguayan son of a man from Aberdeen.
Dedicated on its title page to the memory of H P Lovecraft There are more Things is in the tradition of ‘entering a strange house’ stories and ends with an undescribed horror approaching the narrator. Borges’s interest in Scotland is in evidence again. A character is named Alexander Muir and the narrator tells us, “Scotland’s symbol, after all, is the thistle.”
The Sect of the Thirty is a ‘fragment from a manuscript’ tale and reveals the origins of the titular sect’s name.
The night of the gifts contains a tale within a tale within a tale – all inside six pages. The gifts are knowledge of both love and death.
The mirror and the mask is set in the aftermath of the Battle of Clontarf when the High King of Ireland commissions a bard to compose a poem celebrating the victory, then – when it is delivered the next year – another, and finally a third the year after that. Each poem’s significance eclipses the earlier’s.
Undr purports to be a translation of an old manuscript and is another tale within a tale in which a man travels to the land of the Urns to find the single word which is their poetry plus a short rendering of his life thereafter to find the word’s meaning; and that of life.
In Utopia of a tired man our narrator is strolling a vast plain and comes across a building inhabited by a man who, when he speaks, reveals they are in the narrator’s (and the reader’s) future. Within the story’s seven pages we learn how the world came to be as it is and some of the future humans’ beliefs. Borges provides us with some sly digs at his own trade. “Printing – which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness – was one of man’s worst evils.” “Language is a system of quotations.”
The bribe is an account of a piece of academic politics wherein one scholar publishes a critical paper as a stratagem to incline his criticisee to nominate him for a place at a conference.
Avelino Arredondo plans his forthcoming action for the morning of the twenty-fifth of August, sequestering himself from friends, fiancée and newspapers so that none but him can be blamed for it.
In The disk a now blind woodcutter recalls the time he gave a stranger shelter. In the morning the stranger told him he was the king of the Secgens and had Odin’s ring – the only one-sided ring in the world – in his palm. The woodcutter tried to obtain the ring.
The Book of Sand is a story which claims to be true. A man in Buenos Aires (with a great personal affection for Scotland through a love for Stevenson and Hume) opens his door to a Bible seller from Orkney – to where he hopes to return – who shows him the Book of Books, one which has no beginning nor end and whose pagination is arbitrary. He buys it.
The latter half of the book contains many of Borges’s poems; each printed with the original Spanish on the left hand page and the English translation on the right.

Pedant’s corner:- in the author’s note; Wells’ (Wells’s.) Otherwise:- Heraclitus’ (Heraclitus’s,) Tacitus’ (Tacitus’s,) Beauvais’ (Beauvais’s,) John Wilkins’ (Wilkins’s,) Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) extra marks for ‘hanged himself’. “One day less.” (One day fewer,) Wiclif (usually spelled Wycliffe,) Córboda (Córdoba.) In the Notes; Borges’ (Borges’s.)

Penguin, 2014, 119 p. Translated from the Spanish Memoria de mis putas tristes (Mondadori, Barcelona, 2005) by Edith Grossman

The title strongly suggests this (short) novel will address at least two of literature’s big three themes. Sex certainly and, if not death, then at least old age. And it does so from the first sentence, where our narrator reveals that the year he turned ninety he, “wanted to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” A columnist on a Colombian newspaper, this is a man who has always paid for the women he has had sex with – even if they threw the money on the floor straight away.

He contacts his madam of choice, Rosa Cabarcas, to arrange the contract. In the event, though, when he enters the room the child is sleeping and he does nothing to disturb her. Instead he begins to idolise her and reminisce about his past life.

That title is slightly misleading, there is not actually much about whores in the 119 pages, whether melancholy or otherwise. What there is, are the ruminations of an old man on life, love and obsession, thus hitting squarely on literature’s third big theme. Of women he says, “they know the how and the why when they want to,” and of ageing as a man, “among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission.” There is also some wit. The state censor at the newspaper, altogether too fond of striking his pen through the whole of a piece of copy, is dubbed the Abominable No-Man.

It is definitely the work of a writer who knew thoroughly what he was doing and how to achieve his ends but also with the sly urge to provoke.

Pedant’s corner:- “the incipient down on her pubis” (the pubis is the pubic bone, not the genital area. The external prominence is the Mons pubis.) “The best part of her body were her large, silent stepping feet” (the best part was,) Praxiteles’ (Praxiteles’s,) Heraclitus’ (Heraclitus’s.)