Piano Stories
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0811221806
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the writer adored by the likes of García Marquez, Calvino, and Francine Prose comes a collection of Hernández's classic tales
Piano Stories presents fifteen wonderful works by the great Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernández, “a writer like no other,” as Italo Calvino declares in his introduction: “like no European or Latin American. He is an ‘irregular,’ who eludes all classifications and labellings — yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” Piano Stories contains classic tales such as “The Daisy Dolls,” “The Usher,” and “The Flooded House.”
earth, my shadow blotted out my crumbling tracks and was, in turn, swallowed up in the long shadows of the trees slowly stretching past me. My tired flesh weighed on me and my fetlocks hurt. Sometimes I forgot to coordinate my front and hind quarters and I stumbled and almost fell. Suddenly I would smell water — but it was just some stagnant pond nearby. My eyes, too, were ponds reflecting all sorts of things, big and small, near and far, on their sloped surfaces brightened with tears. I had
showing an interest in her play I would ask for a kiss and she would cover me with hugs and kisses. Yet the minute I found myself kissing her, I felt I didn’t love her, that I had been less than honest with myself, and that I was only trying to make the best of a complicated situation I had gotten myself into. Then I kissed her on the cheeks, trying to avoid the big tears pouring down them, because when I came in contact with them I felt obliged to lick them away and they were getting heavier and
pianist) “is here.” After dinner, Alex removed the wineglasses on a tray. They rang against each other, as if happy to meet again. The master, half-asleep — in a sort of quiet glow — was pleasantly roused by the sound and called out after him: “Tell Walter to go to the piano. He mustn’t talk to me as I come in. Is the piano far from the glass cases?” “Yes, sir, on the other side of the room.” “Good. Tell Walter to sit with his back to me, to start on the first piece in the program and keep
Miss Margaret a bit as if I were seeing her through Hector’s eyes, then through Mary’s eyes, but I was too lazy to keep that up for long and soon fell back on my selfish ways: listening placidly while I rowed, hoping that if I just sat there and waited with careless but genuinely affectionate goodwill for her to say whatever she pleased, in the end she would settle comfortably in my understanding. Or it might happen that by simply living next to her, letting myself fall under her spell, that
dark earth. For a while, when the first plants were put in, the fountain had seemed to go on dreaming serenely of the water it used to hold. But since then the plants had kept growing into a tangle, like garbled messages, and she had to keep having them changed. She wanted the water to recall the silence of untroubled sleep or the murmuring voices of happy families (which was why she had told Mary she was deaf and could be reached only on the phone). She also wanted to drift over the water, slow