SPIKS

by Pedro Juan Soto ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 1973

The author of these short stories belongs to the generation of Puerto Rican writers who, toward the early 1950's, sought a demotic idiom, psychological Drang, and an anti-imperialist lesson. Taken all together, this brief volume, first published in Spanish in 1956, fails on each count. Most of the stories are about trammeled and degraded Puerto Rican women. The women live on the Manhattan mainland along with their men, who, spic-fashion, brawl and brag and defeat themselves. There are potentially powerful situations between the men and the women. The abandoned wife Altagracia drinks herself into imaginary little orgies with her absent husband; a bar girl assaults the drifter who knocked her up on a bet, then turns toward pentecostal ecstasy. Mutually demeaning spars and flights. But the stories are too economical, too writer's-class slice-of-lifey. They nudge the reader for a second the way a ""human interest"" newspaper filler does. Moreover, the translation distracts from any response. The brilliantly unobtrusive idiomatic way in which Oscar Lewis renders Mexican and Puerto Rican speech provides a standard which these ""waddid's,"" ""wanna's,"" ""an's"" and ""fer's"" never reach. However the translator's failures hardly excuse Soto's. Take ""Scribbles"" -- a story about a feckless Puerto Rican husband drawing an ambitious, romantic picture on the bathroom wall as a Christmas present to his beady-eyed wife, who of course screams and washes it off. Inverted O. Henry, awfully far from the power of the early Richard Wright, say, who made oppression real because it was real, complicated, intelligent people being oppressed. Soto's characters remain spots on the wall.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1973

Categories: FICTION