Celina or the Cats

Born in Cuba and a resident of Mexico since 1955, Campos is the author of The Fear of Losing Eurydice and the Xavier Villarutia Prize-winning She Has Reddish Hair and Her Name Is Sabina. The six pieces here are enjoyable, if not urgent, and top-notch translations render them in fluid English. In the title story, the narrator, a successful physician, recalls the disintegration of his marriage of 13 years. He describes his wife, Celina, her neediness and his growing distance, which forces her to retreat into herself and a room filled with cats. A young girl named Natalia anticipates ``The Baptism'' of her doll, Michel, and relates the details of the moment in believably childlike prose (``It's strange to feel how wet her feet are and the sharp, biting grass beneath her soles. She runs with her eyes shut''). A woman named Alda, for whom time stopped on August 20, 1933, tries to recall her past and to block out unpleasant memories in ``All the Roses,'' while snapshots of generations of domestic activity are found in ``The House'' in Havana. Campos's introductory essay, ``On Cats and Other World,'' is a bit fluttery, but its description of cats (``those soft, ripping, cruel, delicate beings, those solitary nocturnal, always unpredictable beings that inject our everyday world with the sphere of the unknown'') says much about the layers of meaning in her writing. (Nov.)