La Calle de Las Calas Grises

Argentine journalist Alonso (b. 1936) was a finalist for Premio Primavera de Novela with Vientos de noviembre para el amor (November Winds for Love, Espasa, 1998). His new book takes place in Colonia 231, a timeless fictional village in the depths of rural Argentina. Its dwellers roam from a bordello, where everyone is dressed in costumes, to a church painted in the most unlikely colors. Alonso adheres to the tradition of magic realism throughout, as in the episode where a postman who systematically reads all the mail in town becomes furious after discovering a passionate love letter from his wife to the town poet. When he sets off to kill them, a dense white fog suddenly covers the town and, from that day on, Colonia 231 is renamed ""Tinieblas Blancas"" (""White Darkness""). The book is also chock-full of references to Borges, but unlike Borges's succinct prose, Alonso's writing is slow-paced and somewhat redundant. The one-dimensional characters (a lustful priest and a crazed inventor, for instance) are limited to repeating the same routines. The author's discussions of themes like love, passion, loneliness, and oblivion, though, are witty and funny. Nonnative Spanish speakers won't have difficulty reading this novel. Recommended for bookstores and public libraries with large fiction collections.Carlos Rodriguez Martorell, New York City