Eye of the Heart

by Barbara Howes

Book Overview

Hispanic (Spanish: hispano, hispánico) is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar and Spain. During the modern... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380001632
• ISBN13: 9780380001637
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Worthwhile

This book was published in 1973 and contained 42 pieces by 41 authors, from 13 nations and Puerto Rico. The selections, almost all of them short stories, ranged from the 1880s (Machado de Assis and Ruben Dario) through each decade to 1970 (Roa Bastos), with coverage heaviest for the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Cuba were the most frequently represented countries. For Argentina, with the most authors, the choices were Lugones, Güiraldes, Borges, Arlt, Cortázar, Bioy Casares and Costantini. The youngest authors were Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Edwards of Chile and Mario Vargas Llosa, born in the late 1920s/mid-1930s. The female authors included were Mistral, Bombal, Silveira de Queiroz, Lispector and Somers. Other of the well-known writers included Guimarães Rosa, Onetti, Amado, Rulfo, Donoso, García Márquez and Cabrera Infante. For me, the distinctive things about this book were the care it took in selecting for the most part stories that were relatively easy to follow and enjoy, and its inclusion of writers who don't often appear in subsequent anthologies, such as Gallegos, Güiraldes, Arlt, Arguedas, Bosch, Arreola and Roa Bastos. Unlike, say, the Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature published in the same decade, the present book for the most part avoided fragmented, baroque writing, except in the selections for Asturias and Carpentier. In addition, several of the region's best-known poets were included (Darío, Mistral, Vallejo, Neruda, Paz), though with prose selections, not poetry. Neruda's contained reminiscences of his childhood, interest in nature and reading. My favorites were some of the older stories: Gallegos' "The Devil's Twilight" (1919), which described starkly a character who played a devil in a town's parades and what happened to him. Arlt's "One Sunday Afternoon" (1933), in which two marginal characters in Buenos Aires, a man and woman, spoke frankly to each other about their hopes and desires. Alfonso Reyes' "Major Aranda's Hand" (1949), about a disembodied hand that took on a life of its own, in a manner that recalled something of Gogol. And Paz's lyrical, ultimately dark "My Life with the Wave" (1949), about a man who fell in and out of love with a wave in the form of a woman: "Love was a game, a perpetual creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence . . . . Her presence was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in the wink of an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently depo

A Wonderful Introduction to Latin Magic Realism

The fabulous little collection of short fiction is a msut read for people wanting to discover the passion of Latin Magic Realism genre of fiction. My personal favorite stories were YZUR by Leopoldo Lugones, The Other Death by Jorge Luis Borges and Like the NIght bt Alejo Carpentier. I first read this book in a class at California College of Arts and Crafts called Ethic Writers taught by Richard Oyama. It was an intruduction to the beginning of a love affair with Borges,Paz, Carlos Fuentes,Maria Luisa Bombal, Laura Esquival, Sandra Cisnero...and on and on

Great stories

I had to read some of the short stories featured in this book, and I thought it would be boring. When I started to read the first one, "The Phychiatrist" (please excuse my spelling!) I was actually laughing! This was a school assignment! I recommend this book to anyone who likes short stories in particular, and who is interested in the Latino culture.