Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal and fantastical stories that border on the nightmarish, exploring the nature of memory, family, and the difficult imbalances of love.
"Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."--Jorge Luis Borges
"Silvina Ocampo's prose is made of elegant pleasures and delicate terrors. Her stories take place in a liquid, viscous reality, where innocence quietly bleeds into cruelty, and the mundane seeps, unnoticed, into the bizarre. Revered by some of the masters of fantastic literature, such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Ocampo is beyond great--she is necessary."--Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University
Forgotten Journey, a collection of 28 short stories first published in 1937, was the world's introduction to Silvina Ocampo, considered one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With it, Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic politics of memory, writing in what would become her signature lyrical, oneiric, and slightly menacing style, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her long and productive career. Plots give way to the wiles of events being narrated, protagonists are often unaware of what's going on, and the atmosphere almost always borders on a nightmarish, fantastical dimension.
The collection takes its title from its eponymous story of a girl who struggles to recall the events of her birth in order to regain the memory of her identity. In this vein, Forgotten Journey follows girls and women at different stages of life, grappling with identity, memory, and the cruelty of the worlds they inhabit. Helpless children, faithful servants, gardeners and governesses, circus performers and lovers: Ocampo writes characters at the margins of what would optimistically be called "the believable," crafting unrealities and warping language to realize a logic of dreams, memory, and a child's imagination.
Synopsis
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.
"Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."--Jorge Luis Borges
"I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."--Italo Calvino
"Silvina Ocampo's prose is made of elegant pleasures and delicate terrors. Her stories take place in a liquid, viscous reality, where innocence quietly bleeds into cruelty, and the mundane seeps, unnoticed, into the bizarre. Revered by some of the masters of fantastic literature, such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Ocampo is beyond great--she is necessary."--Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University
"Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."--Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread
In this, Silvina Ocampo's first book of stories, we discover the purest form of what would become her signature style over the years: lyrical, oneiric, and menacing--and an atmosphere, both mundane and mysterious, bordering on the fantastical.
Forgotten Journey takes its title from the story of a girl who struggles to recall the events of her birth in order to remember her identity. Another story follows a friendship between two girls, one poor and one wealthy, who grow up to appear identical to one another, enabling them to trade lives and families. In "The Enmity of Things," a young man begins to suspect that his mundane possessions are conspiring against him. When he flees to his rural childhood home, the silent countryside proves only more sinister and mysterious.
This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career.
Synopsis
"The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."--Mariana Enriquez, LitHub
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.
"Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."--Lily Meyer, NPR
"Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."--Jorge Luis Borges
"I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."--Italo Calvino
"These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub
" . . . it is for the precise and terrible beauty of her sentences that this book should be read.A masterpiece of midcentury modernist literature triumphantly translated into our times."--Publishers Weekly * Starred Review
"Ocampo is beyond great--she is necessary."--Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University
"Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."--Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread
"Ocampo is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. . . . This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work."--Publishers Weekly
This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career.
Praise for Forgotten Journey:
"Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered."--Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories
"The Southern Cone queen of the short-story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more."--Gabriela Alem n, author of Poso Wells
"Silvina Ocampo's fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges's. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It's thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head spinning and thrilling."--Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
Synopsis
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.
Synopsis
This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. Here in her fiction debut we discover the purest form of what would become Silvina Ocampo's signature style over the years: lyrical, oneiric, and menacing. Delicately crafted, intensely visual, and deeply personal, these stories explore the nature and politics of memory, family, and the difficult imbalances of love.