Peruvian Literature: Silvio in the Rose Garden

Silvio in the Rose Garden
Julio Ramón Ribeyro

The stories in this collection are inhabited by a bunch of losers and outsiders: dejected loners, anonymous employees, hopeless crooks, impoverished aristocrats. With an ironic and disenchanted style, Julio Ramón Ribeyro situates his creatures at the brink of a crucial moment: a last chance to leave their dull and marginal existences. The chance is however an illusion, as they are inevitably overwhelmed by their own weaknesses or swept away by an oppressive social environment. In the end, as we can deduce from the story that entitles the volume -probably Ribeyro's best-, the only dignity these characters can aspire to is a lucid consciousness of their own marginality.

Many of the stories are set in Lima, which appears a city besieged by poverty, discrimination, and violence. However, a nostalgic breeze alleviates the gloomy atmospheres, in particular when Ribeyro evokes Miraflores, the district of his childhood and youth.

Acclaimed as one of Latin American best storytellers, recognition arrived just too late for Julio Ramón Ribeyro. He won the prestigious Juan Rulfo award in 1994, a few months before his death. A marginal himself, just as the characters he depicted, he let his alter ego Luder remark: "I'm like a third division football player. I scored my best goals on a dusty field of the suburbs, in front of four drunk fans that remember nothing".

Unfortunately -as couldn't be otherwise with Ribeyro-, few of his books have been translated into English, and this one is a hard find.

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