Duplications and Other Stories

Panamanian author Levi's latest collection of stories, and his first book translated into English, overcomes a persistently prosaic translation to challenge the darker corners of the human imagination. Almost prose poems in their precision and use of language, each of the eight stories is divided into a series of vignettes exploring incidents, relationships or emotions from diverse viewpoints. Almost inevitably, an otherworldly twist or two is plunked in to unsettle the reader at the end. In ``Metamorphoses,'' for example, a woman recalling her violent rape escapes by evolving into the sunset; a wife continually degraded by her neglectful, philandering husband transforms herself into a lawn table to punish him; and a young lover changes into a lamppost in a spiritual death brought on by love. In ``Incidents,'' a young woman observes two mannequins making love in a store window, and an aging woman's reflection in a mirror narrates the woman's-and the mirror's-eventual death. The stories' urban squalor and moody perspective add to a dark view of human interactions limited topetty misunderstandings, bothered sex and brutality, but they revel in the power of the human imagination to describe those interactions in outlandishly original ways. (Sept.)