The Word of the Speechless

The late Peruvian writer’s knack for the uncanny is on display in these gripping stories culled from a body of work spanning 40 years. Those written in the early ’50s are populated with sinister figures often posed as familiar subjects such as, in the case of “Meeting of Creditors,” tax collectors. The stories range from the macabre, as with “Nothing to be Done, Monsieur Baruch,” in which a man abruptly slits his own throat, to the mysterious, as with the man in “Doubled” who goes searching for his doppelgänger. Ribeyro (1929–1994) also trades in satire and irony—“A Literary Tea Party” watches a group of bourgeois intelligentsia as they wait around for a famous writer expected to attend their party. As the collection progresses in time, continuing through to the early ’90s, the stories become more plotted and less creepy, but retain their theme of focusing on a single male character. “Silvio in El Rosedal” is a complicated story about a bachelor who inherits an estate in the Italian countryside. The later stories go on too long and lack the tight, enthralling storytelling from earlier work, and in general the reader becomes a bit fatigued by the expectation of an inevitable wink at the end of each story. Nevertheless, these pieces dig into the human psyche with sharpness and wit. [em](Aug.) [/em]