These short latin american storiess will put you in front of the force of the word. Here you can delight in what lives in the imagination of some of the best writers in Latin America, who dare to use language as a tool to convey various nuances of reality.
If you want to delve into the power of creative writing and short story production on the American continent, this selection of short Latin American stories You will love!
In the era of micro-stories we want to share with you some of the short Latin American stories that are a must on the night table of literature lovers. I hope you enjoy it!
In a notorious neighborhood of Jafa, a certain anonymous disciple of Jesus was arguing with the courtesans.
-The Magdalene has fallen in love with the rabbi, 'said a.
-His love is divine -replied the man.
-Divine?… Will you deny me that he adores his blond hair, his deep eyes, his royal blood, his mysterious knowledge, his dominion over people; her beauty, in short?
-No doubt; but he loves him without hope, and for this his love is divine.
Commentary: Lugones confronts us with the idea of unconditional love typical of Christic thought. Love as a pure power that does not need to take over the existence of the other to love him completely. Love as a feeling that emerges to nurture, not to get entangled in the trap of possession and attachment.
I came home at dawn, falling asleep. Upon entering, everything is dark. In order not to wake anyone, I tiptoed forward and reached the spiral staircase that led to my room. As soon as I stepped onto the first step, I doubted whether this was my house or a house identical to mine. And while I was going up I was afraid that another boy, like me, was sleeping in my room and perhaps dreaming of me in the very act of climbing the spiral staircase. I made the last turn, opened the door and there he was, or I, all moonlit, sitting on the bed, eyes wide open. We stood for a moment looking at each other from landmark to landmark. We smile at each other. I felt that his smile was the one that also weighed on my mouth: like in a mirror, one of the two was fallacious. "Who dreams of whom?" Exclaimed one of us, or perhaps both simultaneously. At that moment we heard the noises of footsteps on the spiral staircase: we jumped into each other and thus melted we began to dream of the one who was coming up, that it was me again.
Commentary: This story puts us in front of a recurring theme in literature and that is the existence of parallel universes. Here we are faced with the idea that we are plural and similar to string theory, we find multiple versions of who we are..
Every day he crosses the square in the same direction.
Is beautiful. Neither high nor low, maybe a little thick. Big eyes, regular nose, mature mouth that sweetens the air and does not want to fall from the branch.
However, he has a bitter face and always wears a long, flowing coat. Although it is exceptionally hot. This garment never falls off your body. Winter and summer, thicker or thinner, always the overcoat as if hiding something. Is she shy? Is it that you are ashamed of so much useless street?
Is that coat the fortress of a secret feeling of inferiority? It wouldn't be weird. That is why he has an architectural style that he could not define, but that, surely, any architect knows..
Maybe you are too high or too low, or you don't have a waist. Perhaps you want to hide a pregnancy, but it is too long a pregnancy, of a few years. Either it will be to feel more alone or so that all your cells can think better. Savor a memory inside that cloister far from the world.
Does she just want to hide that her father committed a crime when she was fifteen?.
Commentary: Vicente Huidobro is one of the most brilliant writers in Latin America. In this micro-story, he presents us with two interesting themes, on the one hand, the hidden languages that inhabit things as simple as our way of dressing, and on the other, the worlds that can emerge from the capacity of observation..
Anthropologists at Duke University in the United States estimate that Neanderthal man, who inhabited the earth more than four hundred thousand years ago, possessed the gift of speech. This novelty could answer a question that until today had no answer.
To find that answer you will have to go back to a Neanderthal tribe, one night in particular. The men and women are around the fire, looking for warmth and celebrating the end of another day. On the morning of the same day, the men had gone hunting in search of food. The women, meanwhile, took care of their children. Now that the sun is gone, it is time to rest and share the experiences of the day. Each man tells how he caught the prey he was chasing. Don't know how to lie.
But for one of these men the hunt had been a failure. When it is his turn, he has no feats to count. So you decide to invent them. Lies an impossible hunt. He does it with such perfection that it transforms that lie into a beautiful and gripping story. They all ask me to repeat it. That night, unknowingly, that anonymous Neanderthal man had just invented literature.
Commentary: This picturesque tale puts us in front of the idea of literature as an invention of man that allows him to live what reality deprives him of. A kind of catharsis of the human being in which he can inhabit other possible worlds in which he is the hero of his own story.
In the middle of the jungle, in the darkest night of the great trees, surrounded by the humid silence spread by the vast leaves of the wild banana, the Gaviero knew the fear of his most secret miseries, the fear of a great emptiness that lurked behind him. his years full of stories and landscapes. All night the Gaviero remained in painful vigil, waiting, fearing the collapse of his being, his shipwreck in the swirling waters of madness. From these bitter hours of insomnia the Gaviero was left with a secret wound from which at times flowed the thin lymph of a secret and unnameable fear. The commotion of the cockatoos that flocked across the rosy expanse of dawn, returned him to the world of his fellow men and returned to placing the usual tools of man in his hands. Neither love, nor misery, nor hope, nor anger were the same for him after his terrifying vigil in the wet and nocturnal solitude of the jungle..
Commentary: There is nothing more revealing than the encounter of being with its loneliness, this appointment that no one can avoid makes each person see life from a different nuance. The feeling of being alone in the world changes us completely.
A cronopio is going to open the front door, and when he puts his hand in his pocket to take out the key what he takes out is a box of matches, then this cronopio is very distressed and begins to think that if instead of the key he finds the matches, it would be horrible if the world had suddenly shifted, and maybe if the matches are where the key, it may happen that you find the wallet full of matches, and the sugar bowl full of money, and the piano full of sugar, and the phone book full of music, and the closet full of subscribers, and the bed full of suits, and the vases full of sheets, and the streetcars full of roses, and the fields full of streetcars. So this cronopio is horribly distressed and runs to look at himself in the mirror, but since the mirror is somewhat tilted what he sees is the umbrella stand in the hallway, and his presumptions are confirmed and he bursts into sobs, falls to his knees and joins his little hands, he does not know what for. The neighboring fames come to console him, and also the hopes, but hours pass before the cronopio comes out of his despair and accepts a cup of tea, which he looks and examines long before drinking, it will not happen that instead of a cup of tea be it an anthill or a book by Samuel Smiles.
Commentary: Within the short Latin American stories, those of Julio Cortázar must be yes or yes. His ability to draw the world in different ways, the turns of his thought are true works of art. In this story, he puts us in front of the terror that one day without further ado our comfort zone changes and the world will stop being what we think it is. That resounding fear of change, that terror in the face of the unexpected.
One of the oldest and most universal myths, it says that the first night the woman and the man were lying together ... when he heard a threatening noise, a gnashing of teeth between her legs and the shock that cut off their embrace.
The most macho males in the world (truth be told) still tremble.
Anywhere in the world, when they remember, without knowing what they remember, that first danger of devouring. And the most macho males wonder, without knowing what they are wondering: Is it that the woman is still a gateway that has no way out??
Commentary: The eternal discussion between the magical and the mysterious of the relationship between men and women. Galeano draws the woman as an unanswered riddle within the man, as an influence that cannot be escaped and that condemns him to be imprisoned within her for who knows for how many eternities.
It is the drama of the disenchanted man who threw himself into the street from a tenth floor, and as he fell he was seeing through the windows the intimacy of his neighbors, the small domestic tragedies, the furtive loves, the brief moments of happiness, whose news They had never reached the common staircase, so that in the moment of bursting against the pavement of the street he had completely changed his conception of the world, and had come to the conclusion that that life that he left forever through the false door it was worth living.
Commentary: Suicide is one of the most painful problems in today's society. Sometimes we get so immersed in our personal drama that we lose sight that life is more than that moment of pain that grips us. This life is a bittersweet mix of joy and pain that we all take small sips of. If we connected more with each other, we would discover that we are all passengers on the same ship and that all that we call misery can simply be the spice of life.
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
Commentary: This is one of the shortest stories in literature, its masterfulness lies in the fact that it has all the necessary stylistic elements to be placed in the short story genre..
-Montaigne says the same or something similar in his "Essays" - someone reproaches him when hearing him deliver a moralizing sentence.
-And that? Luder protests. That just goes to show that the classics keep plagiarizing us from the grave..
Commentary: This story confronts us with the ego of some writers who believe themselves to be the owners of ideas. Borges said that all are variations of the same metaphor, the initial metaphor Life itself!
In a drawer there is a dagger.
It was forged in Toledo, at the end of the last century; Luis Melián Lafinur gave it to my father, who brought it from Uruguay; Evaristo Carriego once had it in his hand.
Those who see it have to play with it for a while; It is noted that they have been looking for it for a long time; the hand rushes to tighten the hilt that awaits it; obedient and powerful blade plays with precision on the scabbard.
Another thing wants the dagger.
It is more than a structure made of metals; men thought about it and formed it for a very precise purpose; it is, in some way eternal, the dagger that a man killed in Tacuarembó last night and the daggers that killed Caesar. He wants to kill, he wants to shed blood.
In a desk drawer, between drafts and letters, the dagger endlessly dreams of its simple tiger dream, and the hand becomes animated when it governs it because metal is animated, the metal that senses the murderer for whom it was created by the mens.
Sometimes I feel sorry for him. So much hardness, so much faith, so peaceful or innocent arrogance, and the years go by, useless.
Commentary: Within the short Latin American stories, Jorge Luis Borges has a special place. His ability to bring out the secret life of things is unmatched. This writer stands out for looking beyond the merely visible and invites us to delve into the soul of all that is.
This is a story of times and kingdoms past. The sculptor walked with the tyrant through the palace gardens. Beyond the labyrinth for illustrious foreigners, at the end of the avenue of beheaded philosophers, the sculptor presented his latest work: a naiad that was a fountain. While abounding in technical explanations and enjoying the intoxication of triumph, the artist noticed a threatening shadow on the beautiful face of his protector. He understood the cause. "How can such a tiny being" - the tyrant was no doubt thinking - "is capable of what I, the shepherd of peoples, am incapable of?" Then a bird, drinking at the fountain, fled rejoicing in the air and the sculptor came up with the idea that he would save it. "However humble they are," he said, indicating the bird, "we must admit that they fly better than us.".
Commentary: This beautiful micro-story puts us in front of the theme of the arrogance of the creator, of the idea of superiority and perfection of man that distances him from all that is alive..
The novelist, in his shirtsleeves, put a sheet of paper into the typewriter, numbered it, and began to relate a pirate boarding. He did not know the sea and yet he was going to paint the southern seas, turbulent and mysterious; He had never dealt with more than unromantic employees and dark, peaceful neighbors, but he had to say now what pirates are like; he heard his wife's goldfinches chirp, and in those moments he populated the gloomy and frightening skies with albatrosses and large seabirds.
The fight that he had with rapacious publishers and with an indifferent public seemed to him the approach; the misery that threatened their home, the rough sea. And when describing the waves in which corpses and broken masts swayed, the miserable writer thought of his life without triumph, ruled by deaf and fatal forces, and in spite of everything fascinating, magical, supernatural..
Commentary: The writer's craft may not be a bed of roses, as evidenced in many of the Latin American short stories. However, the possibility of living many lives simultaneously, of saving oneself from the harshness of reality, turns into literature everything that is normal in the eyes of others..
They were arrested for indecency. And no one believed them when the man and the woman tried to explain themselves. In fact, his love was not simple. He suffered from claustrophobia and she suffered from agoraphobia. It was only because of that they fornicated on the thresholds.
Commentary: This funny and sweet story has the unmistakable touch of Mario Benedetti, it also puts us in front of the issue of modesty in our societies, and what the life of those who have a phobia or mental condition that leads them to live the reality of different modes.
In a lonely place whose name is irrelevant, there was a man who spent his life avoiding the specific woman. He preferred the manual enjoyment of reading, and he effectively congratulated himself every time a knight-errant fully rammed one of those vague female ghosts, made of virtues and superimposed skirts, that await the hero after four hundred pages of exploits, lies, and nonsense..
On the threshold of old age, a flesh and blood woman made room for the anchorite in his cave. Under any pretext, she entered the room and invaded it with a strong aroma of sweat and wool, of a young peasant woman warmed by the sun..
The knight lost his head, but far from catching the one in front of him, he chased through page and page of a pompous spawn of fantasy. He walked many leagues, speared lambs and mills, deburred a few oaks and struck three or four shoes in the air.
Upon returning from the fruitless search, death awaited him at the door of his house. He only had time to dictate a cavernous will, from the bottom of his parched soul. But a shepherd's dusty face washed away with true tears, and had a useless glint at the insane knight's grave.
Commentary: The fear of love, the fear of pain, strongly avoiding fantasy is usually the perfect escape for those who, out of fear, do not face the delusions of love to which their soul calls them in a hurry. It is surprising but humanity is more afraid of love than loneliness.
I am sure that this selection of Latin American short stories filled your head with fascinating stories that reveal the condition of the human being from a playful and true perspective. I hope you are encouraged to explore a little more the fascinating world of literature that has so much to tell us.
Yet No Comments