Thus Were Their Faces

by Silvina Ocampo, Helen Oyeyemi (Introduction), Daniel Balderston (Translator)

An NYRB Classics Original

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer “better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.” Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”

Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Magical Realism, Classics, Fantasy, Horror, Latin American

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1988

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

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), poet and extraordinary teller of tales from Argentina.

More than 30 stories collected here, as dark, Gothic, fantastic, imaginative and disturbing as any tales you will ever read. And for those who are not familiar with Silvina Ocampo, this NYRB Classic includes an insightful introductory essay by contemporary British novelist Helen Oyeyemi and also a preface by Jorge Luis Borges. To share a specific taste for the author’s world-class storytelling, here is my write-up of one of the many memorable tale from the collection:

The House Made Out of Sugar
Terror All Around: “Superstitions kept Cristina from living.” Our first-person narrator begins by elaborating on how the love of his life, a young lady he will soon marry, Cristina, is made mad by fear over such objects as a coin with a blurry face, a spot of ink or the moon seen through two panes of glass; and not only with such as coins or ink, but Cristina refuses to cross certain streets, to see certain people, listen to certain pieces of music or eat strawberries in summer.

Harsh Judgement: Back at the time when her tales were first published, many literary critics judged Silvina Ocampo’s treatment of her characters as “far too cruel.” With Cristina, we are given a sense of just how cruel – to be in terror of much of ordinary, everyday life to the point of acute paranoia was, according to those critics, cruelty in the extreme, entirely unacceptable for an author of literary fiction.

Dream House: Once engaged to be married, our narrator must find a new place to live, one where no one has lived previously, since, according to Cristina, the fate of any former occupant would exert an influence on her own life (not on his life or their joint lives, he notes somewhat sourly, but only on her life). Finally, he finds such a house, an absolutely perfect house with a phone inside and garden in front, a house so white and gleaming it’s as if it’s made of sugar.

Unfortunate Fact: He discovers a family once did occupy the house many years ago. No big deal, he thinks, and proceeds to convince Cristina no one has ever lived there and this house of sugar is the house of their dreams. Cristina believes him, cries out with joy once she takes a tour: “Here it smells clean. Nobody will be able to influence our lives or soil them with thoughts that corrupt the air.” So, a few days later they wed and move in. Do you sense a trace of Gothic horror brewing?

Chinks in The Armor: Their happiness runneth over; their tranquility seems like it will never be broken. Then it happened: one day he answered the phone and someone asked for Mrs. Violeta, the person he surmised to be the previous tenant. Ah, if Cristina answered that phone call, that would spell the end of their happy marriage forever. Precautionary measures must be taken: he makes sure the phone remains off the hook and places a mailbox out by the gate and keeps for himself the one and only mailbox key.

Mysterious Gift: Then, early one morning there’s a knock at the door – someone has left a package. He races downstairs but Cristina has already ripped open the package and is holding a velvet dress. “When did you order the dress, Cristina, and how did you pay for it?” She replies: “I ordered it some time ago and Mother gave me a few pesos.” This seems strange but he doesn’t say anything so as to offend her. Shortly thereafter, he notices Cristina’s character change: she has become sad, reserved, and nervous; she has lost her appetite and no longer wants to go to the theater or movies. Something is definitely amiss.

Gnawing Suspicion: A dog enters their garden; Cristina names the dog Love and takes the dog in as her own. Then one afternoon he comes home unexpectedly and discovers a bicycle lying in the yard. Cristina is speaking with a young woman. He hides behind the door to overhear their conversation. The woman says she always wanted to meet her ever since she was eight-years old girl and calls Cristina by the name of Violeta. The young girl insists Violeta (Cristina) keep her lost dog and she will visit occasionally. Cristina replies how visits would be impossible since her husband doesn’t like strangers. The young girl, in turn, proposes they meet every Monday evening at seven at Columbia Square, on one of the bridges. Cristina tells her that her name is not Violeta, to which the young lady says how she has always been mysterious. At this point she leaves. Meanwhile, the narrator begins to feel a gnawing suspicion since it was as if he had just witnessed a theatrical rehearsal but he says nothing to Cristina.

Violeta: Every day the narrator walks to the bridge to check to see if Cristina will come. He doesn’t see her but one day at home Cristina is hugging the dog and asks him if he would like it if she change her name to Violeta. He tells Cristina he wants her to keep her own name. Then, on a Saturday night he finally sees her on the bridge. She shows no surprise when he approaches. They exchange words and Cristina says how she dreams about trips, leaving without ever leaving, leaving and staying and by staying leaving.

Probing Question: Then one fateful day when he sees her again on the bridge, he ventures to ask, “If we were to discover that this house was once inhabited by other people, what would you do, Cristina? Would you move away? Cristina replies, “If other people lived in this house, they must have been like those sugar figurines on desserts, or birthday cakes, sweet as sugar. This house makes me feel secure. It is the little garden by the entrance that makes me feel so calm? I don’t know! I wouldn’t move for all the money in the world. Besides, we don’t have anywhere to go. You yourself said that some time ago.”

Ominous Visitor: One morning he watches from an upstairs window as a stranger arrives and threatens Cristina, saying if she, Violeta, sees Daniel again she will pay dearly. Cristina replies she doesn’t know Daniel and her name isn’t Violeta. The stranger accuses Cristina of lying. Cristina says she doesn’t want to listen. Hearing this, the narrator rushes downstairs and tells the intruder to get out. He looks closely at the stranger’s feet, hands and neck and realizes it’s a man in woman’s clothing. He doesn’t exchange words with Cristina on this episode but it was around this time that Cristina began singing spontaneously. Her voice was pleasant enough but it felt like a secret world that drew her away. Why?

Identity Theft: Then one day Cristina says, “I suspect I am inheriting someone’s life, her joys and sorrows, mistakes and successes. I’m bewitched.” This startling revelation propels the narrator on a search for Violeta and the story takes a few more mysterious and eerily disturbing turns leading up to the concluding short paragraph: “From then on, Cristina had become Violeta, at least as far as I was concerned. I tried following her day and night to find her in the arms of her lovers. I became so estranged from her that I viewed her as a complete stranger. One winter night she fled. I searched for her until dawn. I don’t know who was the victim of whom in that house made of sugar, which now stands empty.”

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that is going to stick with me for a very, very long time mainly because of the beauty, intense originality, and strangeness of Silvina Ocampo's writing. The stories in this book are certainly bizarre and have a way of unexpectedly creeping up on you as you are reading. Here you will find an abundance of tales of murder and death in many different, bizarre forms; long-term resentments that turn into breaking points which materialize in different guises, and there are also stories that focus on prophecy and dreams that are also not without their deeper, darker edges.

Reading strictly for plot here is kind of beyond the point, so readers who have to have every single thing explained are probably going to be lost and will probably not like this book. It is yet another work that is a mind-stretching experience for people who want to move beyond the norm and who are looking for something that demands quite a bit more out of themselves as readers -- challenging, yes, but the payoff comes from immersing yourself in some of the best writing ever. On the back cover of my book there's a brief statement from Borges in which he says that "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature," and he's absolutely correct. While he was referring to writers from Latin America, I think what he says about her stories having "no equal" is absolutely spot on, at least in my experience.

http://www.oddlyweirdfiction.com/2018...

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

What this gains as a reference work from its scope and depth in drawing from Ocampo's many collections, it loses somewhat as a cohesive reading experience, as a single book. Or this may be because my copy came from the library, meaning I couldn't leave as much space to breath between stories as they may deserve. In any event she really hit her stride, in content and style, with the collection The Guests, from which the eerie and mysterious title story was drawn. Here, the menace of earlier stories (the vicious little melodramas of The Fury) gains the fateful ambience of the classically weird tale, set into a wider surrealist resonance with the world. I'd actually love to read just The Guests as a since cohesive collection. Instead, we get part of it, with lesser examples of Ocampo's craft stretching before and after (though the stories of The Fury also seem to form a powerful and cohesive set, here incomplete) and earlier novella The Imposter is a Cortazar-prefiguring masterpiece of a certain unrelenting narrative pull of another world, until reader and subjective reality cross over into a new understanding. Simultaneously incomplete and overwhelming, yet essential.

[maryamongstories · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was beautifully written, and I wish a few of these stories had been full novels just so I could spend more time with them. Short story collections always tend to feel too short for me, but I'm definitely interested in reading more works by this author!

[maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what Edgar Allan Poe would sound like if he were a woman living in a posh part of Buenos Aires in the first half of the 20th century. A creepy abandoned house, a knife, a gun, melancholy, madness. At the same time: grassy plains, flamingos, a silver mate gourd, alfajores. The Argentine literary canon is exclusively male. Let's hope this English-language translation of Silvina Ocampo's short fiction starts to change that.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly think that the only sad part about death, about the idea of death is knowing that it cannot be remembered by the person who has died but solely, and sadly, by those who watched that person die." From Autobiograpy of Irene

I saw an apt description of Ocampo's work awhile back, and it rang in my ears as I read this large translated compilation of stories from the 1930s-1980s: "[Ocampo] is very much the spider-in-the-picnic-basket kind of writer." That is open to interpretation, but hits pretty close. What did the spider DO in your basket before you discovered it? Is there just one?

Ocampo relished her strange and cruel reputation. Her work was denied an Argentine literary honor because it was deemed "far too cruel". Of course, that was in 1942, and cruelty has gotten much more cruel in that interim. Cruel may be described as more "gothic", "strange", or "surreal" now, but there is some cruelty too. Similar writers that come to mind are Lispector and Schweblin - weird, sometimes grotesque, but altogether addictive to read.

I took my time with this collection. It started very strong with the novella "The Imposter" which was a fantastic story and the highlight for me, followed by Autobiography of Irene". There were several "okay" stories, which is to be expected when the volume contains 42 stories from 50 years of work. One of my favorites was a micro just one page long - "Report from Heaven and Hell". Brilliant little discourse. I also liked the addition of her late stories, "The Music of the Rain", and "And So Forth".

In the Translator Notes, Balderston states that he become close friends with Ocampo, and attended a few dinner parties with the little Buenos Aires cadre of writers that included her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, her sister, Victoria, and the legendary Jorge Luis Borges. When this compilation was discussed with Ocampo, she discussed with Balderston that she wanted her "cruelest" stories to be included (I bet she did it with a smile on her face!)

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Those more inclined towards decadence and less towards roughage will like this collection more than I. The last time I ran through such thickened ichor of narrative was in Ada, or Ardor and mostly forgotten readings of Poe, both of them engaged with during a time when I was bowled over more by prose and fancy musings. Things probably would have gone better had I taken this slow, but there is a difference between giving the author a measured chance and putting enough space between singular stories to let the overt thematic similarities drain to a tolerable level. I believe "Report on Heaven and Hell" to be one of the best short stories of all time, but when one is talking seven collections and forty-two pieces all together, it's difficult for two pages to make up for the other three-hundred-and-fifty.

I know she said she didn't read much, but I'm getting to get a sense of where Lispector came from. Yes yes, wrong country of Latin America and different language altogether, but the introspection into threats of violence and glittering view of grotesqueries has a similar feel. Ocampo requires a far more solid grasp on the material level of things, but in return she has mastered a metamorphosis that draws you in till it's much too late, the best example of this being "Men Animals Vines". The problem with a scope of this collection's sort is the sheer amount blurring everything together, piling cruelty upon poisoned dark chocolate truffle upon cruelty until even the talk of suicide grows old. Cruel in and of itself, but you can only cry wolf in front of gilt edged mirrors in the midst of petite bourgeoisie finery so often.

I'm counting on someone far more familiar with Buenos Aires and Argentina and co. to fill me on the many things I must have glazed over some time in the future. The richness is something I can enjoy on an instinctual level, but an amount such as this requires a scaffold when the swamp gets especially fertile. Translation, of course, must also be a consideration.

The world is not magical. We make it magical all of as sudden inside us, and nobody finds out until many years later.

[Silvia Moreno-Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silvina Ocampo Aguirre is one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century, and you paradoxically probably never heard of her. This is the problem with translations, writers slipping through the cracks and never making it into English.
This volume solves this issue and hopefully reveals Ocampo to an English speaking audience which had never sampled her stories. Her fiction could be termed Weird literature and will interest the people who lean more lit when they read their spec fiction. Strange, dark and often cruel, her stories are a wonderful example of what Latin American literature, that amorphous category, is.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her stories are frequently short, but always cruel. She is from a wealthy family who married a handsome writer named Adolfo Bioy Casares. This same Bioy Casares was a frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, who in turn published many of his works in a magazine called Sur, whose publisher was her sister, Victoria Ocampo.

Silvina Ocampo is a sort of Hispanic Patricia Highsmith, except that she also wrote poetry (which now I will have to look into). Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories is a selection of mostly short fiction from eight of her many books. Included also is a novelette called The Impostor which has one of the most surprising endings I have ever encountered in fiction -- and I say that in a good sense.

Although she is so very different, with her concentration on wayward women and children and the evil thoughts that sometimes hold sway over them. Yet I almost feel as if I were reading a story by Borges set in Buenos Aires or the Pampas, except that instead of a deep literary or philosophical intellect I encounter a distaff sense of evil. It seems almost as if Pandora were loose by the Lakes of Palermo.

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I understood that our lives depend on a certain number of people who see us as living beings. If those people imagine that we are dead, we die."

"I'm not sad. I've no fear of dying and destiny has never disappointed me. These are my final afternoons. These pink clouds will be the last ones, shaped like saints, like houses, like lions. Your face will be the last new face; your voice will be the last one I hear."

I used to have this recurring dream as a child... I was in a large space, completely empty, lost and confused. Since then I have been very sensitive to the size of a space, it cannot be too large as it makes me feel so tiny; it cannot be too small, as I feel trapped. Trapped, lost, uncertain, so small, unreal. Kind of like what Ocampo's protagonists feel throughout her stories.

I have seen Ocampo's stories described as "cruel", and they are. She turns the mundane into strange and spectacular, everyday interactions into brutal twists of fate. As you read on, you learn to distrust the sense of false safety. And yet, her stories are never over-dramatic with the aim to shock. There is a slow build-up to unexpected endings. Within all of this, there are real insights about human nature. 

Highly recommended to lovers of 'weird fiction'. Think Shirley Jackson, Mariana Enriquez, Samantha Schweblin, Flannery O'Connor and Angela Carter.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Redemption through evil."

Ocampo and the translator set out to collect her "cruelest" stories in this volume, thus you will find it unsurprising that these mostly brief vignettes are downright disturbing, sometimes hilarious, and probably contributing to the decline of someone's morals somewhere.
Brief as I said, with most 2-3 pages, these scurrilous tales focus largely on death and children, two things people don't usually like to see together especially when it is the latter that is responsible for the former, so, shit, don't come into this with any illusions of innocence. Jealous, covetous children off other children who are sometimes pious, satanic sorcerers; children covet and desire doll-like things; truncate their growth to remain children; spouses metamorph into other people, or are they the other people?!; identity gets smeared and blurred over love, hate, or bad parenting; bakers are assassinated. And so on.
I can't really compare Ocampo to anyone else. Her evil singularity is his charm. I can liken her to a kind of David-Lynch-infested-Mr.-Rogers show. She has a fine, off-kilter style that probably reads better in the original, but the translation seems fine, since she had a hand in it.

[Aria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silvina Ocampo walked so all the other little freaks could run

[Chythan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it is quite easy to discern a Borgesian world in them, Ocampo's stories expose the potential for cruelty inherent in human beings and display a greater sense of disruption. Particularly the cruelty children are capable of. The coldness of her writing lies in the revelation of the 'casualness' of that cruelty. Overturning the myth of innocence of childhood, Ocampo delves into the darkness that pervades childhood and often carried with into adulthood. It is no surprise that she was denied Argentina's National Prize for fiction citing the reason of "too much cruelty". Many of them told through the stories of girls and young women, she unmasks the space of violence the idealistic image of peaceful domesticity belies. 

Conjuring up a literary world of fantastic, often betraying the surreal elements, Ocampo delves into the everyday life of people to bring forth the disfigurations and rottenness that lie beneath. The language of Ocampo reflects her obsession with the most efficient tool of storytelling, memory. Like one's memory, her stories do not follow a linear rhythm or a rational narrative of causality.  It moves to and forth, induces a sense of  confusion and often a dreamlike evocation of strangeness. A language whose brilliance thrives on a fleeting recovery of memory.

More often than not, she depends on child narrators to tell an evocative tale. For example in the story 'The Clock House', the child narrator recollects casually the abuse and possibly murder of a local hunchback at the hands of his neighbors. In just two pages, in her narrator's incomprehension of the event he witnessed, Ocampo leaves the reader with a sense of horror and heaviness. While I liked most of the stories in the collection, some of my favourites are 'The Impostor', 'Autobiography of Irene', 'The House Made of Sugar' and 'The Mortal Sin'

Owing to her lack of popularity compared to her contemporaries, she was once referred to as "the best-kept secret of Argentine letters". Its a shame that I came across her stories so late. Such an admirable and versatile storyteller she is.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of Silvina Ocampo's stories is accompanied by three introductions and prefaces, by Helen Oyeyemi, Borges, and the author herself. The former both use the word 'cruel' to describe the stories, while Ocampo says this:

When you want to die you fall in love with yourself, you look for something touching that will save you. I write to be happy or to give happiness. I, who am unhappy for no reason, want to explain myself, to rejoice, to forget, to find something others might find in Ovid in my unhappiness or my other self.

Thus Were Their Faces is certainly not happy in tone or content. The stories are consistently preoccupied with death, madness, and, yes, cruelty. I don't think any other short story collection I've read includes so many dead children, most of them murdered. There is a morbid gothic sensibility throughout that I didn't enjoy but can respect. Ocampo's writing style is distinctive and unsettling. I was struck by the importance and agency attributed to objects in some stories, while the protagonists themselves seemed helpless due to youth, old age, femininity, and/or illness. Homes are also haunted and eerie, inclined to have a debilitating mental effect on their inhabitants.

Many of the stories are short vignettes, which rather blur into one another. The pervasively oppressive atmosphere is more memorable than the snippets of plot. I think my favourite story is 'Report on Heaven and Hell', which has no characters and is less than two pages in length:

When you die, the demons and angels are equally eager, knowing that you are asleep, still in one world and partly in another, and will come in disguise to your bed, stroke your head, and ask you to choose the things you had preferred during your life. First, they will show you the simple things, as if opening a book of samples. If they show you the sun, the moon, or the stars, you will see them in a ball of painted crystal, and you will think the crystal ball is the world; if they show you the sea or mountains, you will see them in a stone and will think the stone is the sea or mountains; if they show you a horse, it will be a miniature figurine, but you will think the horse is a real horse. The angels and demons will confuse your spirit with pictures of flowers, glazed fruit, and candies. Making you think you are still a child, they will seat you in a chair formed from their hands called the queen's chair, or the golden seat, and in this way they will carry you with their hands clasped through those hallways to the centre of your life, where your favourite things are hidden. Be careful.

[Puella Sole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Svidjelo mi se pisanje Silvine Okampo, sadrži neku vrlo neobičnu notu, i po izboru motiva i po građenju atmosfere u svojim narativnim svjetovima, a svakako da se osjeti autentičnost izraza. Prije nego što sam počela s čitanjem, očekivala sam nešto što možda malo više liči na Borhesa, ali dobila sam mnogo više neke lirske obojenosti. Ono što mi je manje odgovaralo jeste sam koncept ove zbirke, u kojoj su objedinjene priče iz njenih ranije objavljenih knjiga, tako da taman kad uronite u način pisanja karakerističan za jednu zbirku, dođe kraj i vi prelazite na priče pisane 10 godina kasnije i tako stalno. Mislim da mi je to negdje bila najveća smetnja da se malo više uživim u dosta toga.

[T Dinh · Rating 4 out of 5]

once in a blue moon i have the distinct pleasure as a reader to come across works like this - largely incomprehensible, frustrating, challenging, but also horizon bending and impossible to forget. Ocampo was seriously operating in a league of her own and i would be lying if i didn’t say her imagination scares me a little bit (ok a lot). But it also allowed for so many surprises and contemplations that so effortlessly resist legibility. It never tried to be obtuse or difficult, but rather draws out those complicated nuances from the most mundane lives. Ocampo was so witty and so profound, and every time i caught glimpses of what she was trying to tell me i feel as if i was let in on an otherworldly secret. so happy that i randomly picked it up just because of the Remedios Varo work on the cover which is so beyond perfect for this book! There is no way for me to explain this book other than that it was thrilling and dangerous and eerie and everything i could ask for in books!!

[Zoe Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a description like that you can see why I asked Silvina Ocampo's publisher, New York Review of Books, for a review copy. And I can tell you the book lived up to the description.

Ocampo's style is sometimes demanding on the reader and I found myself putting down the book between stories to muse over what I had just read. But the book is all the better for that.

Even though I read the stories several days ago, they have stayed with me like a dark shadow somewhere on the periphery of my vision. The word "dark" is rightly used of Ocampo's stories. At times they reminded me of the adult short stories by Roald Dahl in the way they would jolt me with a sudden dark turn. But then Ocampo also shows that the dark is only seen in the context of light. As she writes in the preface, Writing is having a sprite within reach, something we can turn into a demon or a monster, but also something that will give us unexpected happiness or the wish to die.

Ocampo is probably better known as a poet and it shows in her prose, which is at times sublime. I could fill this review with quotations. But let us just take this one, which ends probably my favourite story in the collection: Beauty has no end or edges. I wait for it. But where is my bed, where can I wait in comfort? I'm not lying down: I'm unable to lie down. A bed is not always a bed. There is the birthing bed, the bed of love, the deathbed, the riverbed. But not a real bed... How perfect is that! The short sentences, the repetition, the symbolism, all could be translated into poetry, all you have to do is add line-breaks. And the poetical form is also appropriate for the story and the voice of the narrator - a woman, who with these words is slipping into death.

Ocampo is masterly in her use of narrative voices. As well as the dying, she is capable of speaking as a child. Sometimes the innocence of the child's voice contrasts with the story the child is unwittingly telling. Sometimes the child narrator is far from innocent. Nor is Ocampo's skill in the use of voices restricted to children. In The Prayer the female narrator is unable to confront the horror of what might/will happen as a result of her action and so the horror is left unstated and yet can clearly be read between the lines, leaving us with a sense of impending doom.

Magic realism appears in many of the stories, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. In one story a gardener's hand digs into the earth only to take root there. In the short story which lends its title to the collection a group of deaf children dream the same dreams, make the same mistakes in their notebooks and when asked to draw all draw pictures of wings. The story culminates with children jumping from a plane. When interviewed, their teacher asserts that when the children threw themselves into the void they had wings.

I commend this magical, dark and wonderful book and its remarkable author to you.

I received this book free from the publisher in return for a fair review.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird, surreal, shot through with the blackest humour, and quite breathtaking.

A retrospective of the short stories of Silvina Ocampo, spanning almost fifty years of her prolific writing career. Ocampo was denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature for the reason that her writing was ‘desmasiado crueles’. This collection represents those stories deemed ‘too cruel’.

Presented chronologically, Thus Were Their Faces is populated by not-so-innocent children, lovers mad with passion, angels, devils and dogs.

Ocampo’s skill at crafting the short story is sublime. She wrong-foots the reader, makes the ordinary extraordinary and naturalises the supernatural.

The opening lines grab the reader immediately, ‘Sometimes I think I can still hear the drum' (The Fury), and the endings come out of nowhere. No word is extraneous. Report on Heaven and Hell is perfection in one page.

From the suspenseful House Made of Sugar and The Imposter, to the metafictional The Objects, to the downright funny: 'There in the garden I noticed the unkempt wigs of some palm trees. What trees! Even a dog wouldn't like them.' (The Sibyl), the writing stuns:

The noise of a sewing machine wrapped the house as if in a hem of silence. (Strange Visit)

In Voice on the telephone I see the legacy of Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures and other Victorian-era grotesque cautionary tales. In turn, echoes of Ocampo’s style can be found in the works of Angela Carter, whose career overlapped the latter decades of Ocampo's, and Antonio Tabucci's Pereira Maintains (see The Velvet Dress).

Wonderful.

[Denise K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few downright jarring stories in this off-the-wall book. I particularly liked "Prayer," "The House Made of Sugar," "The Journey," and "The Velvet Dress." I'm a fan of magical realism and Ocampo does it well. I'm also a fan of what I like to call emotional darkness, and this collection certainly covers it.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Thus were their faces" is an expanded edition of "Leopoldina's Dream"published by Penguin in 1987. For this NYRB edition, translator Daniel Balderston has added new material that make the book roughly one third longer. Those who have read "Leopoldina's Dream" should not read this new expended edition unless they a strong desire to re-read the tales found in the earlier relesed book.
"Thus were their Faces" also has the introduction that Jorge Borges wrote to "Leopoldina's Dream". I think it is easiest to enjoy Ocampo if one treats her work as an extension of Borges' which it is not. Both authors write weird tales. Ocampo, however, is a true surrealist formed in France where as an aspiring painter she studied under Fernand Leger and Giorgio di Chirico. Surreal in French does not mean bizarre; it means higher reality. Surrealism presents a world that appears strange to us because we do not understand the symbols and system of the higher reality. Borges was rather a semiotician who believed that signs were real but that neither the underlying "signified" nor the "signifier" were.
In Ocampo's "surreal" world evil is the primary force in the world. Most of the stories are about children. One group is about how young people discover their vocation for evil. The second group deals with dying people who reflect on the crimes of their youth as they look into mirrors and wonder if their reflected images in fact good doppelgangers of themselves. It is this pre-occupation with mirrors that most clearly unites Ocampo to Borges. Fans of Borges will enjoy this collection.

[Vilis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bija diezgan daudz interesantu stāstu, bet gandrīz visi ar ļoti līdzīgu vaibu. Labākā pieeja laikam būtu izlasīt pa vienam stāstam mēnesī, bet tādai es nebiju īsti gatavs.

[Alan]

Although I appreciate the skill involved in these strange tales, they don't appeal at the moment, other books seem more tempting, and as they're library books I'll switch. Some other time...

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm afraid these read to me like the juvenilia of an overwrought teenager. They are written in a style that hints at profundity but no matter how hard I look, there's nothing there. There's an occasional one that has the nugget of an excellent little horror story in it, like The Clock House - a hunchback with a wrinkled suit who possibly comes to a rather horrific end. Or possibly he doesn't - the unreliability of the narrators means that every story is possibly merely the ravings of a madwoman/man/child. Her obsession with death becomes wearing after a while, especially since even that doesn't feel real, but rather a device she is using for effect. The title story is longer and more substantial - rather sub-Poe with the possibly mad narrator again, moderately dark and reasonably effective. But the other stories are shorter, sometimes not much more than fragments, and the impression they leave is fleeting.

There are 48 stories in the book, and I've read about a quarter of them. I'm afraid I'm increasingly reluctant to spend time on something that is giving me very little enjoyment. I don't hate the stories, but I think they rarely rise above the level of mediocre. Maybe there are lots of great stories among the ones I'm choosing not to read. Maybe I'll read more of them one day. Maybe they will work better for people who are fonder of the surreal and the abstract. Maybe it's all more meaningful if you fully understand the culture in which she was writing. Maybe.

2½ stars for me, so rounded up.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review here at The Fanzine in the Ideal Home Noise column.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why Helen Oyeyemi likes her work so much.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[pae (marginhermit) · Rating 4 out of 5]

a collection of short stories that pirouette between the mundane and the macabre, ruined innocence, the whimsical and the grotesquely real.

[Daniel Polansky]

This one I do remember, however. Ho ho, there are some that you do remember, that scar their notch against your brain, and she was one of them – sexy, funny, utterly unconcerned with genre or literary distinctions, and savagely, brilliantly, mean. Having read these, I was shocked I have never hear of Ms. Ocampo -is this simply a facet of my unknowably vast, indeed, by all-appearances ever growing swell of ignorance, or does she simply not receive her just due? Based on these short stories, the latter at least seems all but impossible. Strong recommendation. Will I Keep it: Obviously.

[Erich · Rating 1 out of 5]

Words can not describe what a pile of shit this book is. Did not finish. She is lucky to have had a successful older sister / husband to get this nonsense put into print. Truly awful.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't say that I enjoyed this book. I picked it up because the back cover listed Borges and Calvino as fans of Ocampo, but I didn't feel any similarities.

I'm not sure if I can explain why I don't like the book, but I'll try. The writing style felt very forgettable, so that my eyes seemed to gloss over everything. I think part of the reason is because all the stories are quite similar, like 100 different versions of the same story. The characters and writing style often felt interchangeable.

I don't think her stories are able to use the potential of literary form, so that her stories feel like passive plays. She does not describe the world but creates a bland room where the entire action is in the dialogue. I think it should be performed rather than read. Since my mind, when reading the stories, doesn't create a world, I felt very disengaged from the writer/reader process.

The stories remind me of Krapp's Last Tape, a one act play by Samuel Beckett. Not to put down the play, I love it, but that it is short, little environment, and has a passive voice.

Impotence, dolls, and outside forces seem to be her themes.

My favourite story, which reminded me a bit of Poe and Lovecraft, was The Imposter. It is the only one that I would recommend, but not even wholeheartedly.

To be clear, I didn't dislike the stories, I just didn't like them. It's the absence of an emotion more than anything.