Antologia: Cuentos de la nena terrible

by Silvina Ocampo, Patricia Nisbet Klingenberg (Editor)

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93), author of seven volumes of poetry and more than three hundred short stories, was a member of Argentina's Sur generation, the extraordinary group of writers who initiated Latin America's literary boom. Like her most distinguished contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo is known for her interest in the supernatural. In contrast to Borges, however, her characters are frequently women or little girls who challenge notions of female propriety at every turn. Ocampo's stories often portray a world of every-day banality in which violence, sexual transgression, and hints of the supernatural combine to question the reader's expectations of female power, freedom and creativity. The selections in this volume trace the female characters of Ocampo's stories from the entirety of her literary production. They are arranged in chronological order so that the evolution of her style is visible. One can perceive, for instance, that her early interest in surrealism returns later in her life. The uncanny sense that there is something going on beneath the surface of her narratives is a characteristic of all of them. Silvina Ocampo has for too long been a kind of insider secret for the literati of her generation. She deserves to be more widely understood as a significant contributor to the innovations of her circle, that of Borges, Bioy Casares, José Bianco and Julio Cortazar. She also deserves to take her place among the more famous Latin American women writers of her day, María Luisa Bombal (Chile), Armonia Somers (Uruguay), Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro (Mexico) and Clarice Lispector (Brazil). She is clearly one of the twentieth century's most original voices.

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2013

About the author

Silvina Ocampo Aguirre was a poet and short-fiction writer.

Ocampo was the youngest of the six children of Manuel Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre. One of her sisters was Victoria Ocampo, the publisher of the literarily important Argentine magazine Sur.

Silvina was educated at home by tutors, and later studied drawing in Paris under Giorgio de Chirico. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose lover she became (1933) when Bioy was 19. They were married in 1940. In 1954 she adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954-94) who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death.

Reviews

[Inma · Rating 2 out of 5]

Innecesariamente brutal y asquerosa

[Juan Fuentes · Rating 4 out of 5]

La factura de la producción de Silvina es excelente, con un lenguaje solido que es un placer leer.

https://liblit.com/silvina-ocampo-cue...

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

My understanding and consideration of this book, the first of Ocampo's work I've read, was hampered I am sorry to admit by my not-so-great command of Spanish, yet I wanted to attempt to read it in Spanish nonetheless. Ocampo was a close friend and associate of Borges and played a key role in the publication of his works and in his literary circle in Argentina. She was, indeed, a very-respected author in her own right and sadly isn't as well-known now (especially outside of Argentina) as she deserves. Her writing holds traces of Borges' voice and his odd, delightful, way of going off on tangents about things at times. Did he inform her of these approaches, or was it the other way around perhaps? Or both ways, at once. In any case, I did enjoy this collection albeit I was hampered in places because I knew due to my less-than-perfect Spanish, I wasn't getting the full benefit of the nuances of her writing. I would recommend Ocampo though to anyone seriously interested in Argentine literature.