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Piano Stories door Felisberto Hernandez
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Piano Stories (editie 2014)

door Felisberto Hernandez (Auteur), Luis Harss (Vertaler), Francine Prose (Voorwoord), Italo Calvino (Introductie)

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1417192,522 (4.33)7
Presents a collection of classic stories by the Uruguayan author, exploring the distortions of memory and the obssessions that can take over everyday life.
Lid:mysterium
Titel:Piano Stories
Auteurs:Felisberto Hernandez (Auteur)
Andere auteurs:Luis Harss (Vertaler), Francine Prose (Voorwoord), Italo Calvino (Introductie)
Info:New Directions (2014), 224 pages
Verzamelingen:Jouw bibliotheek
Waardering:
Trefwoorden:New Directions, Literature, Short Stories, Uruguay, South America, Latin America

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Piano Stories door Felisberto Hernández

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Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."

“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:

THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.

The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.

Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.

The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.

The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.

Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”

( )
  Glenn_Russell | Nov 13, 2018 |

Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."

“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:

THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.

The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.

Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.

The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.

The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.

Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”

( )
  GlennRussell | Feb 16, 2017 |
Felisberto Hernández was an obscure Uruguayan pianist (1902-1964) who earned a meager living playing the piano in cafés and for silent movies. He also was a writer whose three-volume complete works (Obras completas) were published in Mexico posthumously in 1983. Only a small fraction of his short stories are available in English, recently republished as Piano Stories. It has been said that his writing is a precursor of "fabulism," and Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among others have acknowledged his influence.

Most of the fourteen stories in this collection have some connection with a piano or pianist even if only in the background, paralleling the fact of Hernández's life as a provider of mood music, whether in a darkened movie theater or a café. But that is not the point about these stories, really. As Francine Prose explained in her luminous preface, ". . . one always feels that he is writing about a slightly different but parallel universe, in a variant language with its own literature and conventions." And I might add, with its own idiosyncratic characters as well.

One story, "A Stray Horse," is narrated by a ten-year-old boy reminiscing about his first piano lesson:

Entering Celina's house, my eyes were full of the shapes they had gathered in the street. When they were suddenly invaded by the white and black shapes in the room, it seemed the others would fade. But as I sat down to rest — not yet daring to disturb the furniture for fear of the unexpected in a strange house — the shapes of the street lit up in me again, and it was a while before they settled down to sleep.

What never quite went to sleep was the specter of the magnolias. Although I had left behind the trees where they lived, they were with me, hidden in the back of my eyes, and I suddenly felt their presence, light as a breath somehow blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room and blending into the furniture. Which was why, later on — in spite of the miseries I went through in that room — I never stopped seeing the faint glow of magnolias on the furniture and among the white and black shapes.


This is typical of the way Hernández's narrators report on the obscure details of the mind at work — in many cases, a deranged mind.

In "A Woman Who Looked Like Me," a man seems to recall an incident that took place when, he suspected, he had once been a horse.

In "No One Had Lit a Lamp," a writer who reads a story to a small gathering, describes his thoughts as he's reading and then afterwards interacts with some of the people.

"The Daisy Dolls" is about a man who collects life-size female dolls, has them arranged in the evenings as tableaux vivants, and eventually confuses them with the real thing.

In all of the stories, strange though they may be, Hernández seems to be aware of the poetic quality of his writing:

The fact was that my sadness took a poet's pride in itself and in the sense of easy well-being it got from being unloved and misunderstood.

Hernandez expresses ideas in his own kind of prose poetry:

I was the temporary meeting place where my ancestors flowed lazily in my descendants.

* * *
The theater . . . was half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the big black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music, slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion. But once it felt at home, it took part in the music. Then it was like a cat with a long black tail slipping in between the notes, leaving them full of intentions.

* * *
Now, for a few moments, my imagination has flown out the window like a night bug, drawn to the tasks of summer over distances unknown, even to night and to the deep. . . . Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present.

* * *
Although I had been stepping slowly, like a sleepwalker, suddenly I tripped over the wisp of an idea and fell into the moment full of events.


Sometimes the poetry is in mere phrases, which help to maintain the dreamlike quality: "On the last night of my theater of memories"; ". . . like bugs drunk on moonlight."

The interiority of these surreal and almost otherworldly stories is compelling. The unusual point of view each narrator adopts actually causes the reader to slow down to be assured nothing is misunderstood, and while not much really happens in these stories, they leave one feeling wistful or haunted or at least amused. ( )
4 stem Poquette | Aug 7, 2014 |
Wonderful, magical, confusing, mysterious, thought provoking: everything I love in a story collection.

After I finished one of the stories (The Two Stories)I spent a half hour contemplating on the meaning of a short paragraph:

"In spite of everything, I seem to be getting
better all the time at writing about what happens
to me. Too bad I'm also doing worse."

The author was a pianist and draws on that experience in several of the stories. My First Concert was lively and fun.

The Stray horse) and The Green Heart explore memories and how they evolve. There is a story about a doll fetish, one about a strange injection for advertising copy, another about a flooded house. Some are dark, some are humorous, and some are darkly humorous (or humorously dark).

Magical realism at it's beginning. Several authors acknowledge their debt to Hernández and the preface by Francine Prose and the introduction by Italo Calvino are worth reading.

This edition is translated by Luis Harss.

The copy I read is from a public library. ( )
  seeword | Jun 9, 2014 |
The life of the writer’s writer is not generally to be envied. Talented, original, admired by their more successful brethren and ignored by the public, they toil in obscurity, die unnoticed and, if they’re lucky, get revived and stay in print. Herman Melville is perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this treatment, which has also aided writers such as Nathanael West and Henry Green. Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) hasn’t been so lucky. He had a huge influence on Gabriel García Márquez and was admired by Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino—but it didn’t do him much good.

Hernández was born in Uruguay and made his living at the piano, playing a variety of movie theaters and concert halls. He married four times; perhaps his wives became tired of having to support him. The same lucklessness hounded his literary career. In 1947, he scored his sole commercial publication: No One Had Lit a Lamp. It didn’t sell. It wasn’t until 1983 that a three-volume collected works appeared in Mexico, and it was 1993 before he made it to English translation, courtesy of author Luis Harss. The public still wasn’t interested and Piano Stories drifted out of print. However, New Directions has been doing its bit to bring Hernández back, first with Lands of Memory in 2008, and now with a reissue of Piano Stories. The poor man is finally gaining ground!

His life story, being so sad, does threaten the critic’s role in this review. After all, who wants to rain on a man’s posthumous parade? Not me, though my reaction to these fantastical tales has been decidedly ambivalent.

The stories tend to be the first-person narratives of nameless, interchangeable men (often piano players), generally obsessed both with the tactile nature of objects and the houses of strangers (preferably rich ones). They feel like personal aspects of Felisberto Hernández, writing purely for his own pleasure. In the short essay “How Not to Explain My Stories”, he stated “My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me.” His tableau is in some ways Gothic, with mysterious women, decaying houses, and isolated, ritualized atmospheres, but the stories have none of the heavy-handed emotions of the Gothic, being closer in tone to the Decadent movement.

Objects in Piano Stories are often alive, imbued with blood and desire. It is in his treatment of objects that Hernández is most unique. A balcony suicides over its human lover; a boy feels complicity between himself and the feminine furniture whose bodies he explores; perhaps most bizarrely, there’s a man whose fondest companion is his own disease:

“I love my … illness more than life. If I ever thought I might get well it would kill me.”
“But … what is it?”
“Maybe some day I’ll tell you. If you turned out to be one of those persons who can aggravate my … illness, I’d give you that chair with mother-of-pearl inlays that your daughter liked so much.”
I looked at the chair – and for some reason I thought my friend’s illness was seated on it.

The new introduction is by Francine Prose, who writes that reading Hernández is “less like hearing about a dream than like actually having one.” That’s not how Piano Stories struck me. Carlos Fuentes, in his horror stories such as Aura and “The Doll Queen” perfectly captured the irrational, yet watertight logic of a dream. The atmosphere of Piano Stories is one of the sickbed’s languor. The human characters behave as invalids, adrift in the sea of their overwrought sensations, creating memorable situations for themselves out of nothing. More importantly, the sensual overthinking that the author engages in is rarely tedious. Only “The Stray Horse” overstays its welcome. The first half recollects a boy’s early piano lessons; the second half recollects his recollections in a borderline-unreadable circular narrative that is the definition of eye-glazing.

The other long story in the collection, “The Daisy Dolls”, is the bar-none masterpiece of the set and the biggest reason Felisberto Hernández should be in your Latin American literary collection (if you have one). Wholly Gothic and perverse, it centers on a married couple and the husband’s collection of life-size dolls, one of whom was made to look just like his wife … The tension ramps up with jealousy, morbidity, practical jokes and unhealthy excitements. Great squirm-inducing stuff that really got to me.

Relatively few of the other stories have emotional impact. Most of the mysterious scenarios held my interest, but few gained a stronger reaction. It doesn’t surprise me that Márquez—whom I’ve never found emotionally involving—took inspiration from them. They often depend on their concepts for memorability—for example, an usher who can see in the dark and a widow who boats around her flooded house. Other than “The Daisy Dolls”, the standouts are “The Woman Who Looked Like Me”, a vengeful, hallucinogenic riff on Black Beauty; the advertising satire “Lovebird Furniture”; and “No One Had Lit a Lamp”, wherein a young man reads to a parlour assembly and mingles with the guests in a manner that somehow manages to fascinate despite absolutely nothing happening.

Piano Stories rarely spoke to me in a meaningful way, but it was a fascinating, imaginative work, and I won’t soon forget it. I give it a high recommendation to fans of magical realism, especially those interested in the genre’s forerunners. If you’re a collector of the offbeat, Hernández will satisfy. In the internet age, the forgotten writers have their best chance of making a return, and he deserves the notice.

http://pseudointellectualreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/piano-stories-felisber... ( )
1 stem nymith | Apr 19, 2014 |
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