Piano Stories

by Felisberto Hernández, Italo Calvino (Introduction), Francine Prose (Contributor)

From the writer adored by the likes of García Marquez, Calvino, and Francine Prose comes a collection of Hernández's classic tales

Piano Stories presents fifteen wonderful works by the great Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernández, “a writer like no other,” as Italo Calvino declares in his “like no European or Latin American. He is an ‘irregular,’ who eludes all classifications and labellings — yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” Piano Stories contains classic tales such as “The Daisy Dolls,” “The Usher,” and “The Flooded House.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Latin American, Literature, 20th Century, Music, Spanish Literature

281 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Uruguayan writer and pianist.
Considered to be the forefather of fabulism, predating writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, who all note Hernández as a major influence.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piano Stories is a book of transformations, of metamorphoses… Alterations are unpredictable.

I don’t know how to nurture the plant or make it bloom. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes.

Things become persons and persons become things. Inanimate objects acquire souls and human beings lose them.

But at night in the woods the trees attack us from all sides. Some stagger and sway as if about to fall on us, and others trip us up or reach out and grab us with their branches.

Things are not what they seem… And every object possesses multiple essences…

A few summers ago I began to suspect I had once been a horse. At nightfall the thought would stir in me like a horse in a barn. As soon as I put my man’s body down to sleep, my horse memory would begin to wander.

At some fine moments Felisberto Hernández reminded me of Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel.
Some people live in the world where there are no borders between reality and fantasy.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."

“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:

THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.

The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.

Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.

The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.

The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.

Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”

[Lynne King · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wasn't going to bother with a review on this book as I had abandoned it. What really annoys and upsets me is that I am rather taken generally with South American authors. The book looked the part; I loved the cover and the idea of piano stories really appealed to me. The Felisberto Hernandez' stories also came highly recommended by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I really couldn't get my head around this book. Is this meta-fiction? I don't know but the stories were too bizarre for me and normally short stories of this type appeal to me.

But the way the stories were structured were just meaningless words to me. In the short story entitled “How Not to Explain My Stories”, the author himself said that:

My stories have no logical structure. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At a given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promises... All I have is the feeling of hope that it may grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes.

There are fifteen short stories that on the surface look fascinating but I actually couldn’t imagine what was going on quite frankly and in the end abandoned the book after a quick skim through to see if I had missed anything relatively interesting. Perhaps I’m in the wrong state of mind at the moment? There is always that possibility.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the realms of art these days I’m much more interested in the artist's sensibility than (for want of a more complete term) their technical execution, be that technical execution in the realms of "imagination" or the actual words on the page. This is how it was in my early days of art exploration; I “looked through” the surface qualities of the text or painting I was experiencing and into the being, the sensibility, of the artist. It was more akin to interpersonal communication, than to a refracted communication through a medium of art. But I was just a novice then, and that’s how novices often are: they apprehend the essentials of an experience due to lack of experience.

I’m no longer a novice - I’ve been wandering through multitudinous baffling worlds of art expression for decades – and being astray in the immediate incomprehensibility of the new, and the near infinite number of species of artistic expression, and of course the “politics” of the art world (as experienced from my perch on the fringes) has been a tremendous learning experience, stretching my mind like taffy until it has snapped many times. So I understand the importance of not remaining a novice forever, yet I still understand the transcendent virtues of that “untutored” viewpoint; and I certainly understand the importance of seeing through the surface qualities of art (the purely technical innovation, the politics, the new for the sake of new, etc.) and into the sensibility, the very mind of the individual artist. For now I am more interested in interesting people (as expressed through interesting art) than the (seemingly) interesting art as expressed by uninteresting (or simply average) people. This isn’t intended to sound harsh, as I’m interested in uninteresting people, so long as they don’t force their art on me. In early middle-age I’m returning, consciously and unconsciously, to the experiential stance of a novice; and just writing this is helping me get there.

So, Felisberto Hernandez… he’s a new imaginary lover of mine. Or rather our imaginations are new lovers, inextricably intertwined like octopi in a honeymoon jacuzzi. That’s not wholly accurate – he’s the octopus, and I’m maybe a brittle star, but we’re no less intertwined because of our size discrepency and interspecies love. He is considered by many, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez included, the father of Latin fabulist literature, which I take to be related to, if not synonymous with, Magical Realism. I’ve enjoyed loads of magical realism in my time, but now that I’ve read Hernandez he’s put the lie to some of it, especially Marquez. Not that I now consider Marquez a literary fraud; it’s that now I see him as nothing more than a literary figure, a giant literary figure to be sure, but still just a figure, someone with tremendous technical expertise, but without the deeply unique sensibility of Felisberto.

There is a sameness of approach in many of his stories, but even this seeming deficiency serves to emphasize his uniqueness; for why vary from authenticity if the vein is so rich? His main character (often a journeyman piano player like himself) is invited, due to some serendipitous meeting, into new realms of experience that activate a swarm of memories that intrude on the present creating psychic confusion and magic. There is evident a sensitivity and attraction to outcasts and oddballs, eccentrics (often rich) and freaks; but his stories always stick to the tangible realities of his unique and very personal sensibility, as if his carefree imagination simply can’t help but invent, and his imagination’s power being what it is it also can’t help but actually transform the reality experienced – which perhaps is a definition of true Magical Realism. In this way, and even in the particulars of his imagination as expressed through incredibly apt and surprising similes, he reminds me of Richard Brautigan a bit; but only a bit.

This particular collection of his stories is out of print, though used copies aren’t too expensive; but there’s also a collection put out by New Directions (with Joseph Cornell cover art!) that is readily available. Felisberto Hernandez comes highly recommended!

[Ben Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a lazy review. What can I say? It started like this:

At his best, Felisberto Hernandez astonishes. He has a way of seeing. From that stems his charm, his magic, his aura. His gaze penetrates the core of things. Sometimes it strips apart the story that encloses it – the story another object that the gaze penetrates – and the fractious shards-of-mirror effect of the exploded vessel becomes the story.

‘His gaze penetrates the core of things’? It interrogates, draws new cores from things, makes things over for new purposes. When, in ‘The Flooded House’ he says: ‘Then, suddenly, she saw a fountain – and it was as if she had met a face that had been watching for her,’ we are somewhere both familiar and new. Then he says:

She went on seeing it inside her own eyes, then it seemed she and the water were both contemplating the same object – so she could not tell whether a premonition she had later had come to her from depths in the water or in her soul.

After more inversions – the fountain turned this way and that in the light of his thought – he says: ‘... and when she got back in bed she felt real tears, at long last, falling on her nightgown.’ That this passage involves a woman who, having suffered the sudden loss of her husband, chooses to live in a house literally flooded with water by a creative architect, leads us to consider water as reflector and repository of grief. More, as I read this in the sun-sparkling back garden with a glimpse of river-backwater through the trees, I stopped to wonder why so many people are drawn to water in general. Precisely because, Felisberto whispered, of this face that watches for them. Reflection, distortion; water seems to have been created to facilitate metaphor. So to the core of things – the new core, uncovered.

Back to the lazy review:

Not all of these stories pleased me. In ‘The Daisy Dolls’ he tries something different (third-person, more plot-driven, more conceptual) and the result is dry, programmatic. But some of them (‘The Stray Horse’, ‘The Two Stories’, ‘The Woman Who Looked Like Me’) were so good they threatened my entire ratings-system, moved the goalposts. Difficult to read – certain sentences needed untangling before I could decipher them – but these mental contortions were medicinal, freeing up new portions of my mind for blood to flow through.

‘The Stray Horse’: Now that’s a story! A story-almost-not-a-story. Memory interrogated, torn apart, reconfigured. Halfway through it he says:

Something unexpected has happened and I’ve had to interrupt my story. For days now I’ve been at a standstill. Not only am I unable to write, but it’s a great effort for me to live in the present, to live forward... In the end I had lost even my desire to write. And, as it happens, this desire was my last tie to the present. But before this tie came loose, the following occurred: I was quietly enjoying one of those nights of the past. Although I had been stepping slowly, like a sleepwalker, suddenly I tripped over the wisp of an idea and fell into a moment full of events. The place into which I’d fallen was like an irresistible centre of attraction, where a number of muffled secrets lying in wait for me seized and tied down my thoughts, and it has been a struggle ever since.

‘Mental contortions’ follow. The author-narrator splits in two, meets his double:

... I was thinking the ‘someone’ in the back of the room communicating over my shoulder with my memories must have been this partner of mine, who was speculating with those memories as if they belonged to him: he was the one who had written my story.

Then, seemingly every possible reconfiguration of memory:

These memories did not arrive from distant places or know any ballet steps: they came from underground, loaded with remorse, and slithered around under a heavy sky, even during the brightest hours of the day.

As with many of these stories, I reached the end of this one unsure what I’d just witnessed, but dazzled and convinced of Felisberto’s own grasp of the import of these pyrotechnics, even if I couldn’t grasp it. I grasped something. The reconfiguring. The shifting of mental gears – mine – to accommodate his vision. Valuable, this gear-shifting. Invaluable. It can be hard to unclog that rusted machinery.

In the lazy review (which, maybe, said as much as this one) I said:

To me, Felisberto is the Uruguayan Robert Walser – less lovable maybe, less driven to explode received prose-strictures on a line-by-line basis, but more potent, in that every story is unique, every story seems it could be the last, the first, the only.

I’ll let Felisberto tell it:

All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes. I must take care that it does not occupy too much space or try to be too beautiful or intense, helping it to become only what it was meant to be. At the same time, it will be on guard against the mind contemplating it when that mind suggests too many grand meanings or intentions.

(‘How Not to Explain My Stories.’)

Last year I waxed lyrical over Lands of Memory, the other Felisberto collection in English. And yes, on the level of style it may be more graceful, more lavish, but less arresting. If you want to understand why he revolutionised Latin American fiction, you’ll hunt down Piano Stories.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've lived near other people and collected memories that don't belong to me.

Where did Felisberto Hernández come from? I imagine him suddenly materializing from the dream realm onto a piano stool at some hole-in-the-wall bar in Montevideo. Nightly he bangs out tangos on a battered upright while plotting how to enter unknown homes. His days are spent cloistered in his room transcribing these stories shunted from his febrile brain. These stories which are at times completely bizarre yet follow an impeccable inner logic, leading along the hypnotized reader who is unsure of the destination but quite enjoying the ride.

Hernández's fiction exists outside of time, his narrators drift in a liminal state, procuring odd forms of employment such as playing piano in an eccentric woman's darkened dining room or rowing yet another eccentric woman around the grounds of her intentionally flooded house. These narrators draw lonely characters to themselves in the way that symbionts attract each other. There is a necessity to this drawing, an underlying mutualism at work. The narrators reminded me at times of Robert Walser's narrators. Economically challenged and a bit odd, they often display an affectation of humility and carry a definite air of the flâneur.

There are certain stories in this collection that fall squarely in the 'weird fiction' domain. Characters exhibit enhanced sensory or extrasensory talents and utilize them in strange ways. Then there is a story like 'The Woman Who Looked Like Me' in which the narrator suspects he used to be a horse and proceeds to share the detailed memories that prove it. It is here where one can see how Hernández has garnered a reputation as the so-called grandfather of fabulism.

The novella 'The Daisy Dolls' stands apart. Forgoing his typical first-person narrator here, Hernández instead employs a third-person omniscient perspective to tell the story of an wealthy shop owner who pays artists to stage eleborate sets using his collection of larger-than-life female mannequins (or dolls, as they are called here). These sets are arranged in three large glass cases built into a showroom in his 'black house' where he lives with his wife Daisy Mary (who goes by Mary) and their servants, including two maids who are twins and one of whom is also named Mary. Another team of people writes brief captions for each set and places the captions in the drawer of a small table. The shop owner, Horace, after reflecting on the scene in front of him attempts to guess its meaning before reading the caption. Both Horace and Mary become obsessed over one doll in particular, who was made to look like Mary and who they name Daisy to, uh, distinguish her from Mary. Mary likes to create 'surprises' for Horace using Daisy as a prop, such as placing her high up in a tree during a birthday party held in Daisy's honor. As you can probably see by now, things between the dolls and the humans get rather weird indeed. To go into all the specifics would ruin the fun, though, so I'll just leave it at that. This story made me think of Rachel Ingalls's novella 'In the Act', although this is a much more elaborate story with more complex thematic layering. But it did make me wonder if Ingalls had read this one.

Not every story in the collection fully won me over. Some were just okay, particularly when juxtaposed with the more brilliant pieces. I debated on not assigning a star rating because of this, but by the end I'd tallied up enough good ones to warrant a four-star rating. Hernández is in a class by himself, even with respect to his Latin American magical realist heirs.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Who put Daisy in the piano?”

Felisberto Hernandez died in poverty and ill health, his stories out of print, largely ignored by the literary scene during his lifetime [and even more obscure today, apparently]. Yet, he made an impression on other writers who felt honored to mention him as an influence, or as a precursor of magic realism: Marquez, Cortazar, Calvino.
He was also a piano player and composer, but his stories, while anchored firmly in his own experiences as a traveling artist, are rarely about the music, and more often about his efforts to understand the world and the people he met. A mostly futile effort for the sensitive man, whose wild imagination took him to places that are fascinating and mysterious, yet still out of his grasp.

His smile faded and he finally became what he was destined to be: an empty railway car, detached from life.

There’s no other writer quite like Felisberto Hernandez and comparisons, even with the three names I already dropped, are not enough to describe his unique approach to storytelling, his craving to see beyond the surface of things and people, to uncover the fantastic and absurd truths about life that have been somehow denied to him in childhood. In one of the very first stories in the collection, the narrator is a child who goes for his piano lessons to the house of an old lady, where he proceeds to imagine the household objects have private lives of their own, almost within touch of his inquisitive gaze: ... I had probably been more on track when I was raising the skirts of the chairs.

The feelings of alienation and loneliness, the retreat from reality into a wild and unusual world of imagination, the equal value he assigns to objects and to people and the elusiveness of the answers would be featured in every other story Felisberto writes.[I just love to repeat his musical name]

At first I glanced at things casually. Then I had wondered about the secrets they had in themselves. And suddenly it had occurred to me that they – or other things that I wasn’t seeing at the moment – might be intermediaries in the world of grownups and have hidden meaning or be involved in mysterious actions.

Everything around me – the piano, the lamp, Celina still holding the pencil – radiated a strange heat. At that moment the objects were more alive than we were.

There will be rare moments of fun, conversations and even contact with strangers [and with dolls named Daisy], but the lasting impression of these stories for me is of one immense loneliness, of unquenchable sadness, comparable but of a different flavor to that of Fernando Pessoa.

It was on one of those sad nights, in bed, as my thoughts edged toward sleep, that I began to feel the presences in the house around me, like furniture that kept changing position. From then on I often had that thought at night: they were furniture that could hold still or move, at will. [...]
Between the world and me there was a layer of dense air. On very clear days I could see the world through that air and also hear the noises in the street and the murmur people make when they talk.

The act of writing is one of memory, of revisiting places where the artist felt close to his family or to the strange objects in the houses he visited, in the hope that his older self might identify the secret messages that eluded him on his first visit. Some of the stories are really just descriptions of the artist at work in his small room, trying to express his search for meaning, his reliance on imagination and his belief in the ultimate strangeness of life.

Then I would rediscover a forgotten childish curiosity in myself, as if I were returning to a house in a corner of the woods where I had once lived, surrounded by people whose furniture I was now going through, uncovering secrets I hadn’t suspected at the time, although everyone else may have known them.

Each story included should be introduced on its own terms, its literary merits, its building blocks / metaphors and its characterization given a unique voice, separated by its peers, but I have delayed my review too long and now I find it easier to notice the similarities between them instead of their particularities. Such as the beauty and the sadness that always lead to a touch of madness, a dreamlike quality in the play between light and darkness where something grotesque lurks in the unknown spaces that the eyes and the mind fail to penetrate.

The night floated up around our legs from under the furniture, where the black souls of the chairs grew and spread. Soon the white slip covers were quietly suspended in the air, like small harmless ghosts.

A few summers ago I began to suspect I had once been a horse. At nightfall the thought would stir in me like a horse in a barn. As soon as I put my man’s body down to sleep, my horse memory would begin to wander.

The ambiguity, the imprecision are deliberate and meant to reflect the artist’s struggle to keep the sense of wonder at the world that he had felt in childhood against a backdrop of financial troubles, social awkwardness and professional disillusions. He rarely talks about his music other than as the key that unlocks doors to the strange houses that have captured his imagination, places where the narrator is usually invited to play the piano for the hostess. Still, there is the more clearly autobiographical story named “My First Concert” that includes a powerful image of the struggle to express himself through his music:

In no time I was plunging my hands into the mass of sound and shaping it as if I were molding warm clay.

“The Two Stories” show us a writer at his table, searching for the most honest way to put his fears and his hopes into words. These insights are valuable to me in accepting the weirdness and the absurdity of his more daring fiction. For all the dreamlike strangeness of his world, the lasting impression of Feliberto’s style, beside the pervasive sense sadness and loneliness, is one of honesty and intimacy. The sense of wonder, of empathy with other suffering souls, shines through the darkness that the artist is lost in most of the time.

Because I wanted to be let into the world I decided to adjust to it and allow some of my affection to spill out over everything and everybody.

Here, the writer holds a conversation with his imaginary alter ego, a person better adjusted to the grownup world, who urges him to adapt his style to a more direct, less flamboyant and less magical style in order to achieve commercial success. But for Felisberto this would be a betrayal of how he looks at the objects and people around him, a betrayal of the child who believed that trees and chairs [even balconies] have private lives of their own, separate from those of humans

But my greatest fear was for the things he would suppress, coldly wiping out their secrets until they had been striped of all imprecision, like a dream emptied of everything that makes it fantastic and absurd.

His truths are to be found in shadows and in dark tunnels, not in the bright light of day. The most ambitious, and the longest novella in the collection, describes a collector of dolls, a married man who, in the evening after the meal, organizes elaborate tableaux in his basement involving these dolls, to the tune of a piano player. In another story, a friend of the author surrounds himself with beautiful women, and plays strange games in total darkness in a tunnel on his property.

I can’t talk about it now: the light’s too strong and spoils my picture of the tunnel. It’s like when light enters a camera before the images are fixed. While I’m inside the tunnel I can’t stand even a trace of this light: everything loses its magic, like theater sets the morning after.

... he felt a secret anguish: in order to write, which meant bringing back the events of the past, he had to distort his memories, and he was too fond of those events to allow himself to distort them. He had sat down with the purpose of telling everything exactly as it had happened – and soon realized that this was impossible. And that was when his vague and secret anguish began.

In spite of everything, I seem to be getting better all the time at writing about what happens to me. Too bad I’m also doing worse.

The rejection of realism as too prosaic for art, too depressing for the modern man, drives the author towards the magic of impossible dreams. Many such dreams in this collection turn towards a search for love. The young man falls in love with his older teacher, the piano player is asked to court a young girl who believes she is in love with her balcony, hands touch hands and lips whisper secrets in that pitch black tunnel, the mechanical dolls gain a will of their own [ “If there are spirits that inhabit empty houses, why wouldn’t they inhabit the bodies of dolls?” ], a ghostly young maiden only appears at midnight in her father’s opulent mansion, an extremely fat spinster builds a private lake in the middle of the desert by flooding the inner courtyard of her hacienda, and so on.
Yet, the piano player remains in each story incapable of crossing the gulf separating him from the woman of his dreams, like one of those fairy tale princes cursed by his godmother at birth:

I felt involved in an act of responsibility for which I was not prepared. She had started to pour her soul out and I didn’t know how to receive it or what to do with it.

...useless thoughts, that my head was like a gym where the thoughts were exercising, and that when she’d come in the thoughts had jumped out the window.

Shyness? or fear of commitment? More likely a sensibility that is crippling instead of inspiring, a lack of confidence in his own talents and in his own value as an artist, the result of long years of boring concerts and unsold stories, [ I was sinking into myself the way you sink into a swamp. ] the soul of a poet trapped into a grotesque body. trying to reach out of his dark room but meeting with rejection everywhere he goes. From time to time, he meets a “fellow sleepwalker” and his hopes are renewed, his imagination takes flight once again:

Then she went and sat under a tree with her book, and the poems started to float out and spread through the countryside as if taking on the shapes of trees and drifting clouds.

In the end, the house closes its door in his face, its secrets too well guarded, the furniture returns to being inanimate objects and the strong sunlight dispels the elusive shape of dreams.

“Poor thing – so lonely, so in need of talking to someone ... And such a huge body to manage, full of so much sadness ...”

I was fated to know only one side of people, and that only for a short time, like some absent-minded traveler passing through, with no idea of what he was seeing or where he was going.

>>><<<>>><<<

Felisberto Hernandez feels like a lost treasure waiting to be dug out of the swamp of mediocrity and dull routine, to be read late at night with the lights turned low, so that the furniture may wake out of its slumber and the ghosts of past tenants may come out of the woodwork.
I am grateful to whichever friend here on Goodreads whispered his name in my ear some years past.

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I love you because you’re a bit mad” - the confession of Maria, one of 'Piano Stories' characters, encapsulates what I would like to tell Felisberto Hernández after two weeks spent in a flurry of his tangled dreams, grotesque imagery, astounding associations, black humour, eerie music and unsettling atmosphere. To say nothing of a cat with green bows in its ears, a gluttonous ostrich and some bugs drunk on moonlight.

Review to come.

[JimZ]

I am not going to rate this book. As a whole, I did not like this collection of short stories and would ordinarily give it 1 star. However when I give such a poor rating (1 star), that is because I believe there are serious deficiencies in the piece of fiction, and I would not recommend it to others. With this book, I don’t understand/appreciate this style of writing and so I must look to his fellow writers as to what they think of this writing…and I find appreciation and praise.

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today.
• Italo Calvino (who write the Introduction): Felisberto Hernandez is a writer like no other: like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.
• Francine Prose (who wrote the Preface): A vision of such startling beauty that it flares up like an old-fashioned phosphorus match and illuminates our whole lives.
• And additional praise in reviews in the Time Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review

Of the 15 stories in this collection I did like 3:
• “Lovebird” Furniture: 3 stars
• My First Concert: 4 stars
• Just Before Falling Asleep: 3 stars

I either did not finish or attempt to read 4 stories because of either their length or after reading several pages lost any desire to go on reading them.

Interesting review of a blogger giving some details of Hernandez’s life (1902-1964): https://pseudointellectualreviews.wor...

An excellent essay from the periodical Ploughshares of Emerson College, Winter 2015-16: Felisberto: A Look2 Essay on Felisberto Hernández by Lisa Fetchko: https://www.pshares.org/issues/winter...

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Felisberto, I'm baffled! All this talk of you being a fabulist and a magician and loved by Marquez and Cortazar and Calvino. All these reviews on Goodreads, and all this talk about your "surrealism," and not one word about your greatest, least fabulist story of all... "The Stray Horse". One of the best stories I've ever read by anyone. Yes, there is less of that "fabulist" aesthetic. It's there, but it's so much more quiet and subtle, and the story ambles along without any sort of premise. The deliciousness of this story, the meditative tone, and the way you bring the characters and small minor trivial events to bigger-than-life is magical already, and I still can't figure out why your other stories never connected with me in the same way, or why nobody talks about this one. Maybe because this story doesn't involve fantastic imagery... the way I see it, the other stories had fantastic imagery as part of the content of the story, whereas this one showed you the reality of life while letting you peak (almost as if under the skirt of the furniture so to speak) into the abundant imaginary and secret life that flourished beneath it. It's still fabulist but in this way that multiplies through implication.

The story is divided into 2 sections. The first is remembrances. Nothing really happens and nothing unusual happens. But so much clarity and emotion is in each line, you can feel the significance of each nothingness. It's wonderful. And in parts funny too. The second section is a rumination on the multiplicity of the self, the idea of growing up and becoming a different person, and the impossibility of memory. This second part is great but it does get a little repetitive and even over-reaches towards the end, but I can forgive it that, since it is such a masterpiece of a story.

Since it was winter, night came early. But the windows had not seen it come in: they had gone on absently gazing at the clear sky until the last bit of light faded. The night floated up around our legs from under the furniture, where the black souls of the chairs grew and spread. Soon the white slip covers were quietly suspended in the air, like small harmless ghosts. Suddenly Celina would rise, light a small lamp on a coil and attach it to the candleholder on the piano. When my grandmother and I lit up in the light it was like being in a blaze of bright hay.

---

Celina would make me spread my hands on the keys and, with her fingers, she bent mine back, as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs. She was more closely in touch with my hands than I was myself. When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles, suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight, giving each object a new charm.

---

Meantime I would be watching for signs of affection and hiding in the bushes that I assumed would line the road leading to her. Besides, if she had the feelings I thought she had, she would see into my silence and guess my wish. I couldn't help trying to imagine what such a stern person would be like when she softened and yielded to someone she loved. Perhaps her gnarled hand, the one with the scar on it, would be capable of a gentle caress, in spite of the thick black sleeve stretching down to her wrist. Perhaps the whole scene would take on the beauty and charm of the objects around us when struck by the sounds rising from the piano. Perhaps caressing me she would bend forward, as she did to light the lamp, and meantime the piano, like an old man half asleep, wouldn't mind holding the lamp on its back.

---

Now Celina had torn up all the roads between us, she had torn up secrets before knowing what they contained. Of course, grownups were full of secrets: the words they spoke out loud were always surrounded by others you couldn't hear. Sometimes they pretended to agree on something even though they were saying different things, and it was as surprising as if they thought they were face to face while turning their backs on each other or in the same room while wandering far apart.

---

It was on one of those sad nights, in bed, as my thoughts edged toward sleep, that I began to feel the presences in the house around me, like furniture that kept changing position. From then on I often had that thought at night: they were furniture that could hold still or move, at will. The ones that held still were easy to love because they made no demands on you, while the ones that moved demanded not only love and kisses but harsher things, and were also likely to spring suddenly open and spill out on you. But they did not always surprise you in violent or unpleasant ways: some provided slow, silent surprises, as if they had a bottom drawer that gradually slid open to reveal unfamiliar objects. (Celina kept her drawers locked.) I even knew some persons with closed drawers who were nevertheless so pleasant that if you listened quietly you heard music in them: they were like instruments playing to themselves. Those persons had an aunt who was like a wardrobe in a corner, facing the door: there was nothing she didn't catch in her mirrors and you couldn't even dress without consulting her.

---

The painful and confusing story of my life separates the child I was in the days of Celina from "the man with his tail between his legs."

Some women have seen Celina's child in the man while talking to him. I hadn't known the child was visible in the man until the child himself noticed it and told me he was visible in me, and that the women were seeing him and not me. Moreover, he was the first to attract and seduce them. The man later seduced them by appealing to the child. The man learned deceit from the child--who had much to teach him in that area--and practiced it the way children do. But he did not take into account his remorse or the fact that, although he practiced his deceit only on a few persons, they would multiply in the events and memories that haunted him night and day: which was why, fleeing his remorse, he wanted to be let into the room that had once been his, where the inhabitants of Celina's parlor were now gathered for their ceremony. And the sadness of being rejected and even totally ignored by those inhabitants increased when he remembered some of the persons he had deceived. The man had deceived them with the wiles of the child, but had then, in turn, been seduced by the child he had just used, when he had fallen in love with some of his victims. These were late loves become mythical or perverse with age--and that wasn't the worst of it. Worse still was the fact that the child had been able to attract and seduce the man he later became because his charms were more powerful than those of the man, and because life held more charm for him.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The weird world of Uruguayan fantasist Felisberto is like one of his book flaps states, a look into "slightly different but parallel dimension", oddball humor meets phantasmagorical prose. Bizarre sketches etched with autobiographical authenticity that resemble Proust's capturing of time and memory, automatic writing of the surrealist school, and the goofball antics of silent film comedy. The highlights are definitely "Daisy Dolls" and "The Flooded House". The former takes place in weird house next door to a mysterious factory, and filled with eccentric servants, mirrors(which one of the characters is terrified of) and lifelike human size dolls(some in display cases acting out scenes which reminds of Raymond Rousell's Locus Solus")It is a full plunge into a world of erotic pathos and and very bizarre ideas. The missing link between Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Landolfi's "Gogol's Wife" The latter is another odd dream were a possibly blind, obese women has an author slowly paddle her around her designed flooded house where she occasionally holds her own wake and waxes eccentricities about the nature of water. Other stories feature men who think they are horses,ushers whose eyes glow in the dark, companies that inject commercials into you by syringe, and a woman who can never leave her balcony.

[Nathanimal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a pleasure to encounter a writer so completely himself, whose inner world has its own unique unity. These chatty 'irregulars' are always my favorite discoveries.

I think I liked the more meandering stories best, The Usher, Two Stories, and the first half of The Stray Horse. But they were all interesting and singular in their own way.

Francine Prose's intro was great, too. I think I remember this about her, that she writes good intros, though I can't remember any other specific ones at the moment. . . . but then why am I suddenly reviewing Francine Prose?

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still dancing to these stories as the light dances inside of those mysterious parlors!!!

Yesterday, with impending diarrhea, I even danced to the toilet in great cheer because I had left Felisberto on the ground by the commode after reading on the can an hour earlier. I was in bliss upon returning and spoke to the book as if it was Felisberto himself sitting there, alive in his true spirit of inanimate objects made animate. "Ah, you're still here Felisberto?" I asked, picking the book up like a soft cat while recognizing it had the power to leave as desired. After reading some more and completing my other task, I needed a wash. But before jumping in the shower I put Felisberto outside the bathroom on the carpet so he would not get wet and said, "Stay here, please."

I did not realize I had said these things until later when I began contemplating the stories again in the shower. I don't know if I spoke those words out loud, in a whisper, or only in my mind. I am not one prone to talking to myself and I don't read out loud, so Felisberto must now be a really good friend of mine.

Other times I spoke with him long after midnight, using only a dim light. Some of our best laughs together occurred then. Things were flying onto the pages as they flew off. Where is Horace and his wine from France? wine from France? wine from France?

The joy of reading, the joy of living, at least for me, is to meet humor, honesty, depth, and beauty, as opposed to hunger, superficiality, and greed...........or something like that......so forgive me one moment Felisberto:

How I generally felt after reading:

Borges...........skeptical
Cortazar..........disgusted
Marquez.............pretty bored

But with Felisberto, I see no smoking mirrors, no mind games, no fabrications for a market, no bourgeois self-righteousness and moralizing, no grand constructions made with a publisher hanging over the fireplace. More than any of the obvious comparisons such as Borges, Cortazar, Marques, Rulfo, Onetti, etc., Felisberto makes me think of a Kafka-Tutuola offspring---a beautiful thought in and of itself. There is Kafka's introversion and alienation from a plastic society. And as a result of a deep desire for truth and beauty, he must search and find them in odd places, even if no one understands. From Tutuola (or any of a number of everyday traditionalists) there is the brilliant animism, dynamism, and shape shifting of objects as well as creatures, whereby anything can be possessed by various forces and energies that may tug, push one down an alleyway, or disappear behind a bean. Even light and darkness can desire a meal or provide one. There is not a self, but a collection of selves, that interplay with any other collection of particles in the universe. There may be a variety of authors who do this, including the two Argentinians and one Colombian mentioned above, but Felisberto is different for me. He is authentic and the magic in his stories blooms from experience, emotion, his real life, and some place that he can not identify---not from cafe chit-chat, loaded plots or none at all, entrenched rationalism, and haughty aperitifs. And if someone wishes to label the stories as surrealistic, they still mirror "reality," "make sense," and hold wonderful depth of human experience alongside the beauty, magic, and humor. Although he enjoys himself, this is not a game for Felisberto and these stories truly illuminate his soul, his dreams, and his love. From them I sense an authenticity akin to Kafka or Marechera, a deep authenticity that I spend a lifetime looking for.

I never read introductions (unless by the author of the book) before reading the actual stories/novel/poems, and often times I never read them at all. But being enamored by Felisberto, I went back to read Calvino's introduction immediately after finishing the last story. I suppose it's not bad, maybe it's even pretty good. Who cares? It's the world of "consciousness" again, trying to pick things apart, getting it only half-right or so, maybe, debating the differences between 32.2 and 32.3 without realizing it's infinity......and appearing sacrilegious to me. In his own almost introduction ("How Not to Explain My Stories") Felisberto wrote of his stories: "But I am also aware of their constant battle against the strangers consciousness keeps urging on them." I don't want Calvino's analysis. I want Felisberto's stories. I was even sad when I finished these stories, sad and happy and grateful, which is the definition of true romance I think.

So I must find a soft spot on the bookshelf for you, Felisberto.....so that in that place there will grow no dust, but much appreciated entangling plants for my eyes, "leaves of poetry." And I understand that sometimes you must mosey over to the toilet, crafty!, where I will find you again, and pick you up, and see what new magic you have grown while I was away, so I can grow some more too.




***** ********* ************ **********



"Besides, my partner was a city man with city ideas: he would take many of the objects back to the city with him, changing their lives to make them serve those ideas; he would dust them off and dress them up in a new coat of paint, and they would lose their soul." (pg. 41)

"Yes, that's it. You've understood. She can't go out. Sometimes she can't sleep nights thinking she has to go out the next day. She's up early in the morning preparing for it, getting all excited. But after a while it wears off, she just drops into a chair, she can't do it." (pg. 54)

"Yet I was happy that night: everything in that town was quiet and slow as the old man and I waded through leafy shadows and reflections." (pg. 54)

"Tell us something more about yourself----your personal tastes, habits, whatever." "Ah, as for that," said Horace, "I don't think it would be of any help to you in making up your scenes. For instance, I like to walk on a wooden floor sprinkled with sugar. It's the neat little sound..." (pg. 196)

"In moments of despair you shouldn't cast your body into the water but rather your thoughts, which will come back renewed and change your whole outlook on life." (p. 246)

"Around the table stood several men. One of them wore tails and was saying: 'We have to turn the blood around so it will go out the veins and back through the arteries, instead of out the arteries and back through the veins.' They all clapped and cheered, and the man in tails jumped on a horse in the courtyard and galloped off, through the applause, on clattering hooves that drew sparks from the flagstones." (pg. 176)

"I looked for my hat, which was in a different place each time I reached for it: I couldn't get hold of it or leave." (p. 170)

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

He has become my idol! Genius! Time for me to read his Lands of memory.
His writing is full of rich metaphors; nuanced minute capturing of sensations and thoughts; juxtaposing reality and fiction; a world filled with passions of human playing with materiality.

His magic realism originates from normal mundane world, which seems so close to reality and possibility, that defining it as magic realism story--- in the normal usage of the word, takes away from it everything that is unique about it.


There is a small story ( just 5 or 6 pages) that deals with a dystopian world. Making it, perhaps, the shortest of story to deal with a theme like that.
The protagonist is injected by a fluid so subtly, whose effects triggers a radio commentary inside him, constantly buzzing.
A sort of capitalist dystopian setting, and a vicious cycle comes to surface through all this.

For Julio Cortázar , the mere label of 'fantastic' for his work is rejected: "nobody like him to dissolve it in an incredible enrichment of the total reality that not only contains the verifiable but that props it on the back of the mystery"

It seems Quay brothers made a animation film on hernandez! "Unmistaken hands: Ex Voto F.H"

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection of short based in latin america mainly loosely based around a piano player. This book wont be everyones taste but loved some of the language used.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading this collection about a week after I finished the most remarkable book I’ve ever read, the novel The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe. I gave it five stars, something I rarely do for any book. I find that I’m also giving five stars to this book, a collection of short stories, although I didn’t love it as much as the McCabe. So why give it five stars?
I’ll get to that in a minute.
The name Felisberto Hernandez was unknown to me, until I found out that the filmmakers the Quay brothers had made a film from two of his stories. Being a big fan of theirs, I decided to seek out the author’s work. Having read Piano Stories, I can see what attracted the Quay’s to his stories: they don’t really fit anywhere – they’re not quite surrealism, nor Magic Realism, nor any other category you can think of; but they are extremely bizarre, strangely beautiful and often very disturbing – more than a bit like the Quays’ work, in fact – mostly lacking plot or much in the way of dialogue but instead a series of sensual immersions told from unusual viewpoints, frequently from the point of view of inanimate objects and the lives (and memories) that they may have had.
Three stories I would say are absolute masterpieces: The Balcony (a story of bizarre l’amour fou), “Lovebird Furniture”, a vignette with a central idea so delightful it still tickles me now, and The Flooded House, one of the stories used by the Quays’ and one of the best stories I have ever read, set in, well, a flooded house that is still lived in. Not everything is wonderful however; some stories are so dense to be pretty much impenetrable, and instead of being charming end up being brain-twisting exercises which just try your patience. But the hit-to-miss ratio is very much on the side of ‘hit’. A special word should also go to the feel of the book itself – a wonderful cover, nice, heavy paper – a gorgeously designed object.
So why have I given it five stars?
Because besides the largely wonderful stories within (and even my least favourite pieces are littered with poetic descriptions which as a fellow scribbler make me green with envy), Piano Stories has made me look at the world in a different way. I haven’t described the stories themselves in much detail, you’ll have noticed – and with good reason. I knew nothing about them when I bought the book, and maybe that’s the best way to approach it – just dive in, and take a chance. If you’re looking for something different I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

felisberto, from uruguay, and KICK ASS. so strange. everyday events turn on you and bite you. like you get up, feed the cats, then realize its raining friskies outside and drifting up in the streets. even the damn cats don't recognize that reality is out of wack. or is it?

[Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prose is clunky at points, a pity my friends its true. But the imagination on offer here...dear Christ...makes up for any stylistic blemishes. My favorite story is the four pager about the guy who gets injected with an advertisement for furniture and goes crazy... as one does...haha

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is significant because it contains Hernández‘s masterpiece, a fifty page short novella length story called The Daisy Dolls. It is so good that stands as a gem in its own right in Latin American literature.

Extremely Gothic, irrational and often absurd, it centres on a married couple and the husband’s collection of life-size dolls, one of whom was made to look just like his wife. At the wife’s request, the servants of the house arrange the dolls in various costumes and poses in glass cases around the house. For the reader, a considerable sense of unease develops, though there is often humour as well, and tension builds up through jealousy, delirium, perversion, morbidity, and practical jokes.

It is an stand-out piece of literature that can be read in a number of ways; as a feminist story with the dolls used for pleasure then thrown aside, or that Horace, the husband, has a split personality and the dolls represent his hidden side, reflecting back, perhaps, to his troubled childhood. But it is best enjoyed without too much thought, with any in-depth meaning being considered on completion, or in a second reading.

Daisy Dolls is the penultimate story in the collection, and the one that follows it, The Flooded House is the second best, and shares many of its qualities.

The rest of the stories don’t have the same emotional impact, and tend to be the first-person narratives of nameless men (often piano players, which was how Hernández himself made his living in concert halls), generally obsessed both with the tactile nature of objects and the houses of wealthy strangers. Some have a Gothic feel, with mysterious women, decaying houses, and isolated, hallowed atmospheres where objects are often alive with a sense of desire; a boy feels an attraction between himself and the feminine furniture whose bodies he explores, a man whose fondest companion is his own disease, and a balcony that suicides over its human lover.

It is a highly imaginative and unforgettable piece of work seen now as a forerunner in the genre of magical realism.

Sadly, Hernández (1902-1964) never knew of the success of any of his stories. He just about made ends meet as a concert pianist in his native Uruguay, marrying four times to wives that had enough of having to support him. He toiled at his writing in obscurity and died unnoticed. It wasn’t until 1983 that any of his work was published, and it was in Mexico, with an English translation (from Luis Harss) a decade later. Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino (in his introduction to the book), César Aira and Carlos Fuentes all quote him as being a huge influence on their writing.

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italo Calvino hailed Felisberto Hernandez as one of the two (along with Bruno Schulz) most original and strange authors from the last century. Both Marquez and Cortazar claimed that their work would not have been nearly as interesting without the Uruguayan author's unique sense of storytelling. Predating Magical Realism as an established genre, Felisberto drew on Proust and Rilke to create "gentle surrealisms," in which women become mannequins, men become horses, pianos become coffins, and a whole house becomes literally flooded with memory. What makes these strange event work is that they are set against the backdrop of, and seamlessly integrated into, everyday life. Felisberto is unconcerned with creating an entirely artificial narrative voice and instead tells these stories from his own point of view (and apparently in the same tone and cadence in which he told stories to his friends). Far from being autobiographical, this voice is both personal and authentic, serving as a familiar guide through otherwise unfamiliar circumstances. Felisberto Hernandez was a piano player for silent films and then a concert pianist during his youth, and all the tales in "Piano Stories" contain pianos, whether in the forefront of lessons and concerts, as a reason for the narrator to find himself in strange mansions, or just in passing reference or metaphor. The piano serves as a symbolic "key" and thematic thread tying all the stories together.

[Castles · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it with South American literature that makes it so good?

It’s been a long time since I wanted to read this book and I finally got to it. Goodreads recommended this book to me after reading the wonderful works of Clarice Lispector. With Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar saying that Flisberto Hernandez is a major influence on him, and with a preface by Calvino and Francine Prose, how can you go wrong? I’m very impressed with this group of wonderful writers, confirming that Flisberto is somewhat a writer’s writer.

The stories themselves are hard to describe, he really is his own genre. It was less surrealistic than I’d expected, but literally fantastic nonetheless. Those are stories with objects full of life and character, animated pictures and statues with attitude. It’s so vibrant that you can’t help to think Flisberto might have had some sort of synesthesia. Either that or just a wild and free imagination and a complex inner world, in tune with his childhood.

Actually, I was surprised at how precise he captured the mind state and inner world of a child, and that’s a very sensitive child, which I can humbly add, is pretty natural when you learn the piano in that age.

His ability to portrait other people and characters with an original metaphor was also very impressive. Another enjoyable anecdote is his sense of humor, just at the right amount and at the right time.

Felisberto was somewhat a mystery. A traveling pianist, playing to silent films or private houses. Married four times and didn’t earn enough money and didn’t get his deserved recognition even after publishing his books. I wish he was more well known.

Carlos Vas Serrerra wrote: “There might be only ten persons in the world interested in these stories, but I am one of them”. Well, make it eleven persons because I’m definitely in.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up randomly and I'm really loving it. It's surreal, but in the best way possible...there's a clarity here, though its the clarity of objects infused with drama and unconscious knowledge, metaphors abound and the hushed tension and poetic feel is palpable. Definitely overlooked, little gem which still shines decades after its obscure beginnings....

[Stacia]

I read parts of various stories and they are definitely strange, existing (imo) somewhere between benign horror and surrealness. But, they just weren't that appealing to me. The author overview was certainty different than most (and the part I enjoyed most):

"Felisberto Hernandez was born in 1902, in Uruguay, where he died, sixty-two years later. He made his living as a pianist, accompanying silent films in cinemas and later playing small concert halls throughout Uruguay and Argentina. 'Once, he spent some shadowy months on a grant in France,' writes Harss. 'He married four times; was a great eater and raconteur at literary soirees; had a passion for fat women; loved to improvise on the piano in the style of various classical composers; once toured Argentina with his own trio, other times with a flamboyant, bearded impresario called Venus Gonzalez. He preferred to write in shuttered rooms or basements; suffered a life-long emotional dependence on his mother; was haunted by morbid vanity and a sense of failure; became ill-humored and reactionary in middle age; and died of leukemia, his body so bloated that it had to be removed through the window of a funeral home in a box as large as a piano.'"

[Daniel Polansky]

Really remarkably weird. Felisberto’s obsessions – with tactile sensations, with the secrets of strangers, with inanimate objects and morbidly obese woman – are entirely his own, and expressed in a gloriously peculiar fashion which seems unique now and must have been utterly unfathomable upon its release. They aren’t really my obsessions, however, and there is this kind of maddening similarity to his writing, I read halfway through one of the short stories in here before realizing I read it last week. Certainly original, potentially brilliant, but two collections in I haven’t read anything which really struck me on an emotional level, and I’m not sure I’ll have the energy to work much further through him.

[Alexander Veee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Then she got dressed and took a walk. Some distance ahead, she saw a stream. At first it meant nothing to her, until she remembered streams carried water, and that water was the one thing in the world only she could communicate with. But when she sat by the edge of the stream, letting her eyes follow the current, she had the sudden notion that this water was not addressing her and might even carry her memories off to some faraway place, wearing them down. Her eyes made her concentrate on a leaf that had just fallen into the water from a tree. It drifted for a minute, and just as it went under, she heard a heavy tread like a dull throb. She felt the pounding of vague fears and premonitions and her mind went dark. The tread turned out to be a horse approaching from the other side of the stream. It had a jaunty gait and looked tame and a bit bored as it sank its muzzle in the water to drink. The water enlarged its teeth, as if she were seeing them through a pane of wavy glass. It raised its head dripping water from every hair but without losing its dignity, and she thought of the horses of her own country and of how different the water they drank must be."

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, magical, confusing, mysterious, thought provoking: everything I love in a story collection.

After I finished one of the stories (The Two Stories)I spent a half hour contemplating on the meaning of a short paragraph:

"In spite of everything, I seem to be getting
better all the time at writing about what happens
to me. Too bad I'm also doing worse."

The author was a pianist and draws on that experience in several of the stories. My First Concert was lively and fun.

The Stray Horse and The Green Heart explore memories and how they evolve. There is a story about a doll fetish, one about a strange injection for advertising copy, another about a flooded house. Some are dark, some are humorous, and some are darkly humorous (or humorously dark).

Magical realism at it's beginning. Several authors acknowledge their debt to Hernández and the preface by Francine Prose and the introduction by Italo Calvino are worth reading.

This edition is translated by Luis Harss.

The copy I read is from a public library.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my favorite story "The Flooded House," a woman decides to live in a flooded home because waters hold memory. Many of the stories are memories or preoccupied with memory. Linked with that theme is the impossibility of fully knowing others. The narrator, who is briefly hired to row her around the house, laments, "I was fated to see only one side of people, and that only for a short time, like some absent-minded traveler passing through, with no idea of what he was seeing or where he was going." These are traveler's stories about drifting through various perceptions, taking surprising turns, and flowing over boundaries. "The Woman Who Looked Like Me," begins arrestingly: "A few summers ago I began to suspect I had once been a horse." My other favorites were "My First Concert" and "Just Before Falling Asleep." I didn't get into all the stories, though, and didn't read everything in the collection.

[Philip Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely astonishing. Every story. But the novella, The Daisy Dolls, included in the collection is simply something else I won't ever forget. The conceit in almost every piece in this collection relies on an intrusion into other's lives by the narrators – even when welcomed or simply acting as witness – feels stirringly authentic and relative to any relationship a human can have with one another, an animal, or thing; no matter the surreal or absurd scenarios Hernandez conjures.

[Joe Salas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Piano Stories feels like reading someone's dream journal in which the same motifs repeat: houses full of haunted furniture, strange relatives, people playing obscure games...

The stories are weighted with some kind of Freudian-like symbolism operating from an internal logic the meaning of which is forever, tantalizingly elusive.

Upon finishing any of these short pieces, there is unsettlingly a sensation that the story is a trap, and I the poor mouse.

"The Flooded House" brought to the surface of my mind one of my own childhood memories, the vividness of which was slightly discomforting. One summer day, perhaps I was five years old, I'd had a vision of my house filled with water, as if at the bottom of a lake or ocean. In my mind's eye, I saw myself swimming between the rooms, the water blue and dappled with sunlight from above. I wanted desperately to enter this vision, so I began in actuality to flood the kitchen of our house. I remember standing on a chair in front of the sink, and filling a small, silver cup with water. I would clamber back down the chair and, crouching, pour this water onto the floor, then return to the sink to repeat. I did this until my mother came home from work. By this time, there was a thin layer of water glistening across the entire kitchen floor. Unfortunately, this was not yet enough to swim around in, and also my mother was livid, unsurprisingly. I was often a troublesome child.

[FFFFuh yea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really trippy! Felt the translation but it gave it charm. The shorter stories were the more interesting ones, but overall even the long ones were all surrealist and dreamy. at least thats how they were like for me maybe I just dont know how to read. Some of them went on tangents that did not connect to the story and were very confusing when they went back to the original plot.
My English teacher gave me this idk why though it was so random