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El caballo ciego
Esta extraordinaria novela corta retrata a una familia en 1938. A una joven, casi en el momento de convertirse en adulta, le regalan un caballo castrado y repentinamente ciego. La madre está decidida a sacrificarlo; su hija, a salvarlo. El caballo es el significante central en una lucha triangular y casi freudiana entre un padre, artista fracasado y alcohólico, una madre castradora y pragmática, y una hija que busca su independencia pero no puede permitírsela.
Una ficción de la familia como campo de batalla, en la que todas las conversaciones transcurren en un campo de minas. Una brillante combinación de observaciones agudas, tensión in crescendo y conciencia moral: sencilla en la superficie y compleja en el fondo.
Una ficción de la familia como campo de batalla, en la que todas las conversaciones transcurren en un campo de minas. Una brillante combinación de observaciones agudas, tensión in crescendo y conciencia moral: sencilla en la superficie y compleja en el fondo.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
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414 people want to read
About the author
Kay Boyle
98 books42 followersKay Boyle was a writer of the Lost Generation.
Early years
The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, Howard Peterson Boyle, was a lawyer, but her greatest influence came from her mother, Katherine Evans, a literary and social activist who believed that the wealthy had an obligation to help the less well off. In later years Kay Boyle championed integration and civil rights. She also advocated banning nuclear weapons, and American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.
Boyle was educated at the exclusive Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati. Interested in the arts, she studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before settling in New York City in 1922 where she found work as a writer/editor with a small magazine.
Marriages and family life
That same year, she met and married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and they moved to France in 1923. This resulted in her staying in Europe for the better part of the next twenty years. Separated from her husband, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh, with whom she had a daughter (born after Walsh had died of tuberculosis).
In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail lived together between 1929 until 1932 when, following their divorces, they married. With Vail, she had three more children.
During her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby who owned the Black Sun Press and published her first work of fiction, a collection titled Short Stories. They became such good friends that in 1928 Harry Crosby cashed in some stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. Other friends included Eugene and Maria Jolas. Kay Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day. A poet as well as a novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power relationships between men and women. Kay Boyle's short stories won two O. Henry Awards.
In 1936, she wrote a novel titled Death of a Man, an attack on the growing threat of Nazism, but at that time, no one in America was listening. In 1943, following her divorce from Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein with whom she had two children. After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.
McCarthyism, later life
In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism. Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the U.S. State Department, and Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years. She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines. During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.
In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls' school. He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.
Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College in 1962. In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the "Americans Want to Know" fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge,
Early years
The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, Howard Peterson Boyle, was a lawyer, but her greatest influence came from her mother, Katherine Evans, a literary and social activist who believed that the wealthy had an obligation to help the less well off. In later years Kay Boyle championed integration and civil rights. She also advocated banning nuclear weapons, and American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.
Boyle was educated at the exclusive Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati. Interested in the arts, she studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before settling in New York City in 1922 where she found work as a writer/editor with a small magazine.
Marriages and family life
That same year, she met and married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and they moved to France in 1923. This resulted in her staying in Europe for the better part of the next twenty years. Separated from her husband, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh, with whom she had a daughter (born after Walsh had died of tuberculosis).
In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail lived together between 1929 until 1932 when, following their divorces, they married. With Vail, she had three more children.
During her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby who owned the Black Sun Press and published her first work of fiction, a collection titled Short Stories. They became such good friends that in 1928 Harry Crosby cashed in some stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. Other friends included Eugene and Maria Jolas. Kay Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day. A poet as well as a novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power relationships between men and women. Kay Boyle's short stories won two O. Henry Awards.
In 1936, she wrote a novel titled Death of a Man, an attack on the growing threat of Nazism, but at that time, no one in America was listening. In 1943, following her divorce from Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein with whom she had two children. After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.
McCarthyism, later life
In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism. Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the U.S. State Department, and Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years. She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines. During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.
In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls' school. He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.
Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College in 1962. In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the "Americans Want to Know" fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge,
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
October 18, 2014
He said, the words coming slowly across the grass as the drunken, the flagging, drugged lament drifted hypnotically toward sleep. "I've learned it over and over and I don't want to have to learn it any more, that there isn't any youth and age, there's only life and death," he said.
Some people are loved. Some don't have anyone. Some mothers are loved by their families. Some girls grow up and become loved, already loved, stay loved, in love. Why do some people get this and others do not. I already knew this but think about it a lot. Feel the difference as some fact outside of fair and unfair. The Crazy Hunter dragged what I knew in front of me and pushed this knowledge around like I lost all my gravity. Hovering around in blackness, the what's behind all of it when you close your eyes kind, out of reach, still sickeningly true. It killed me what others called the "shocking ending" that I felt had already been happening in this lost. It had been happening and there wasn't anything left except a dying howl to reach the other side where the others live. This book hurt me.
The daughter Nan (for Nancy) should have been beaten with the "If you want to be treated like an adult you should act like one" stick. You would know that I was repulsed by her. Seventeen, fresh off her two years abroad of dreaming about what students look like in a brochure about glamorous European students. She met a man, she didn't do anything. I know the Italian young people were not free as she dreamed they were. I wish someone had told her to pick up a paint brush and paint something before throwing tantrums about how she should be allowed to run amok in Europe of 1938. To be a painter, maybe, she didn't know. Her father gave up his own painterly dreams when accolades were not dumped on his layabout shoulders. Like father, like daughter. The publication date is 1938 anyway, and her boyfriend ran off (quickly wounded) to fight against Franco in Spain. I figure it is safe to take her for a helpless idiot. (Her and the similarly tantrum throwing teen in the William Carlos Williams Stecher trilogy should be friends. "But I should run around in a war zone! i don't care you can't afford it!" At least the WCW teen actually studied something!) She wanted daddy to go with her and tell her what she should be doing there, anywhere, anyway. The point is it was all on her mother's dime. The father, Candy, (the mother is either the mother or Mrs. Lombe. As if she had no name of her own, only a role as their shadow). Cheap dreams soaring pitifully low on "I'll have something to tell them" in letters. What does it all cost. I felt the point was somewhere in if other people are not real to you you would be no good as any kind of artist. Also, any kind of human being to love another. Bleeding someone else for stone.
Two years ago Nan was too afraid to look at the dead body in their path. A drinking buddy of the Mister. Swimming with sharks, another one. She is frightened to look at the next victim, a bird swinging in a noose. Mother look, I nominate you. I am afraid of you. I love how Boyle made them talk to each other not loud loud. Somewhere cowardly. Wherever there is in the body that doesn't think, doesn't have guts or bleed. That's where they talk to each other and rail and selfish. Never loved each other or stopped so long ago it's the same thing. This way she says she is afraid. Mother lives in the real world where some people are loved and others are not. Where drunks get themselves killed and wild animals in danger. The bird bites her helping hand and flies free. The daughter hates her. I hated her for shutting her eyes again. I knew the mother was going to bear the burden of protecting her again. It was not shocking when she has to tell her daughter that her pathetic father got himself killed. That the world does not save animals, that no one goes free forever. I know her daughter is going to hate her for it though the book ends. It's so cruel that her family rolls away from the body where it is beating. In another (it's happened already) drunken attack because she works and he will not, the father buys a horse. The horse is blind. The daughter plans on leaving in a couple of months, but oh damn just let me have my horse I won't do jack to take care of. I grew up around horses too (like the husband I was also terrified of them) and know very well how insanely expensive it is to feed and care for them. It would take you over. The brat should have gotten a job. If she wasn't going to do the work and STAY, get a job and feed it. You know, act like an adult. Her life is too precious, her slim arms too rare. Oh please. I felt sick from the first page when the slim arms are lorded over the mother's fat ones. The husband breaks down crying he misses his dead wife. The younger Nan takes it, as she always does, as a hurt to herself. Perhaps he doesn't love her as the child of his current wife. Only he misses this wife, but when she was young and on her death bed. He wishes she was dead. The helpless one. It breaks my heart like I never knew the world was unfair when he whines that she should come to him afraid sometimes. She confesses she is afraid, for their daughter. She spends too much time with the wild blind horse. But the father and daughter arrange for the groom to risk his life. They nominate a hero and it is not on their own shoulders. The horse is only the shape of their self pitying day dreams. I don't know what they wanted. He wanted to be someone than who he was. Hide inside a bottle of gin, float to the heavens on a message that says... What's the point? It wouldn't be anything good because Candy can't see anything worth anything to me. It would say he was a brilliant man who didn't have to do a damned thing. Someone else had to do it. Nancy would be young and pretty forever, I guess. What the fuck was that? If Nancy was seventeen in the late 1930s she would be old indeed today. My grandmother and her sister are younger than her and in their 80s. Their conversations consist of female relatives weight. Who is fat, who had the potential to be fat, who was fat back then, who they thought WOULD be fat. What is there in that? Why does it matter if someone no longer had trim ankles? If they do now they won't later. If the horse was terrified of a world he couldn't see it didn't transform Nan into a heroine of dreams of nothing. I don't know what her dreams would be about. She would have to listen to a group of handsome men talking and whatever that was it would be. She is stuck when she wouldn't help the trapped bird. Mother, do it for me. Do the dirty work. Dirty hands don't touch me. I don't know what to do about all of the injured animals. I don't know what to do about horses sitting on the side of the road with a carriage attached to their backs. Tents attached to catch their poop. It's hot and there are flies in their face. Stupid couples pay the old man to ride and all day. It doesn't lift my spirit into a higher plane than anyone else to think about that for a moment. I haven't done anything to make them any more free. But damn, did they think maybe the mom didn't want to have to work so hard to provide for her family? Maybe they could purchase their free time on their own sweat instead of hers. Buy their peace of mind on small heroics than her doing what she could and not big enough for them. Damn I hated Nan and Candy. Boyle was pretty ingenious the way she let the horse no good to what he could do for anyone else anymore. No breeding or stuff humans make horses do. The husband and daughter have written Mrs. Lombe off as better off dead because she's not a teenager anymore. (The one person who doesn't hold the horse up as a symbol of their own self pity was the one I felt had any connection. She did hers in talking about her father a lot. To feel she had had a family who loved her. It wasn't just show off useless applause.) It wasn't that that really got to me though. It's the way she starts talking to people as if she may as well be talking to herself. Bringing up stories that are way too late. The time she left a fourteen year old Nan by herself when they went on a vacation (I agreed that Nan would have hated a roughing it trip). As if she could talk them into seeing her side, that they hated her in the wrong. Damn. When she is used to their litany of hate but ashamed a stranger is witnessing her private pain. Boyle didn't connect all the dots in saying that's what she was doing. It's in how she keeps thinking she can still win her husband and daughter over. That maybe one day they'll see she was doing what had to be done. It was so damned unfair and just how it is. Some people think other people are disposable waste to walk on. That animals are symbols for them to talk big about. I wonder if Nancy will get to marry her rich husband. Maybe she'll die young and her children will dream about what their pretty mama must have been like. I know no one can do anything about people getting old and no one loving them anymore. About outgrowing your use and interest and maybe someone would think you were better off dead. But what really got to me was how much it hurt when the mother is going to have to AGAIN suck it up and do the hard job and she is going to hate her because someone has to be blamed for the way things are. I know I'd be too weak to save all the horses, anyway. But that'll never happen, in general, in universal truths. It hurts when it smacks you in the face anyway.
Anyway, I think Boyle is really good. She doesn't talk too much, lets her story breathe as if you felt the flies heading to the dead body all the time. It turns out I had this shelved to-read already. I read it after reading her translation of Crevel's Babylon. Her translation read more like THIS novel than a different translator of his Difficult Death did. The stream of consciousness style, poetry freedom. The way they ooze out in the dark. I love them both. I don't know how much of it was her. I am useless about pinning down, anyway. I don't think I really want to...
This is the illusion and the real time is night, and the condition not waking protest because I am lying in bed asleep with this letter held under the pillow in my hand.
Some people are loved. Some don't have anyone. Some mothers are loved by their families. Some girls grow up and become loved, already loved, stay loved, in love. Why do some people get this and others do not. I already knew this but think about it a lot. Feel the difference as some fact outside of fair and unfair. The Crazy Hunter dragged what I knew in front of me and pushed this knowledge around like I lost all my gravity. Hovering around in blackness, the what's behind all of it when you close your eyes kind, out of reach, still sickeningly true. It killed me what others called the "shocking ending" that I felt had already been happening in this lost. It had been happening and there wasn't anything left except a dying howl to reach the other side where the others live. This book hurt me.
The daughter Nan (for Nancy) should have been beaten with the "If you want to be treated like an adult you should act like one" stick. You would know that I was repulsed by her. Seventeen, fresh off her two years abroad of dreaming about what students look like in a brochure about glamorous European students. She met a man, she didn't do anything. I know the Italian young people were not free as she dreamed they were. I wish someone had told her to pick up a paint brush and paint something before throwing tantrums about how she should be allowed to run amok in Europe of 1938. To be a painter, maybe, she didn't know. Her father gave up his own painterly dreams when accolades were not dumped on his layabout shoulders. Like father, like daughter. The publication date is 1938 anyway, and her boyfriend ran off (quickly wounded) to fight against Franco in Spain. I figure it is safe to take her for a helpless idiot. (Her and the similarly tantrum throwing teen in the William Carlos Williams Stecher trilogy should be friends. "But I should run around in a war zone! i don't care you can't afford it!" At least the WCW teen actually studied something!) She wanted daddy to go with her and tell her what she should be doing there, anywhere, anyway. The point is it was all on her mother's dime. The father, Candy, (the mother is either the mother or Mrs. Lombe. As if she had no name of her own, only a role as their shadow). Cheap dreams soaring pitifully low on "I'll have something to tell them" in letters. What does it all cost. I felt the point was somewhere in if other people are not real to you you would be no good as any kind of artist. Also, any kind of human being to love another. Bleeding someone else for stone.
Two years ago Nan was too afraid to look at the dead body in their path. A drinking buddy of the Mister. Swimming with sharks, another one. She is frightened to look at the next victim, a bird swinging in a noose. Mother look, I nominate you. I am afraid of you. I love how Boyle made them talk to each other not loud loud. Somewhere cowardly. Wherever there is in the body that doesn't think, doesn't have guts or bleed. That's where they talk to each other and rail and selfish. Never loved each other or stopped so long ago it's the same thing. This way she says she is afraid. Mother lives in the real world where some people are loved and others are not. Where drunks get themselves killed and wild animals in danger. The bird bites her helping hand and flies free. The daughter hates her. I hated her for shutting her eyes again. I knew the mother was going to bear the burden of protecting her again. It was not shocking when she has to tell her daughter that her pathetic father got himself killed. That the world does not save animals, that no one goes free forever. I know her daughter is going to hate her for it though the book ends. It's so cruel that her family rolls away from the body where it is beating. In another (it's happened already) drunken attack because she works and he will not, the father buys a horse. The horse is blind. The daughter plans on leaving in a couple of months, but oh damn just let me have my horse I won't do jack to take care of. I grew up around horses too (like the husband I was also terrified of them) and know very well how insanely expensive it is to feed and care for them. It would take you over. The brat should have gotten a job. If she wasn't going to do the work and STAY, get a job and feed it. You know, act like an adult. Her life is too precious, her slim arms too rare. Oh please. I felt sick from the first page when the slim arms are lorded over the mother's fat ones. The husband breaks down crying he misses his dead wife. The younger Nan takes it, as she always does, as a hurt to herself. Perhaps he doesn't love her as the child of his current wife. Only he misses this wife, but when she was young and on her death bed. He wishes she was dead. The helpless one. It breaks my heart like I never knew the world was unfair when he whines that she should come to him afraid sometimes. She confesses she is afraid, for their daughter. She spends too much time with the wild blind horse. But the father and daughter arrange for the groom to risk his life. They nominate a hero and it is not on their own shoulders. The horse is only the shape of their self pitying day dreams. I don't know what they wanted. He wanted to be someone than who he was. Hide inside a bottle of gin, float to the heavens on a message that says... What's the point? It wouldn't be anything good because Candy can't see anything worth anything to me. It would say he was a brilliant man who didn't have to do a damned thing. Someone else had to do it. Nancy would be young and pretty forever, I guess. What the fuck was that? If Nancy was seventeen in the late 1930s she would be old indeed today. My grandmother and her sister are younger than her and in their 80s. Their conversations consist of female relatives weight. Who is fat, who had the potential to be fat, who was fat back then, who they thought WOULD be fat. What is there in that? Why does it matter if someone no longer had trim ankles? If they do now they won't later. If the horse was terrified of a world he couldn't see it didn't transform Nan into a heroine of dreams of nothing. I don't know what her dreams would be about. She would have to listen to a group of handsome men talking and whatever that was it would be. She is stuck when she wouldn't help the trapped bird. Mother, do it for me. Do the dirty work. Dirty hands don't touch me. I don't know what to do about all of the injured animals. I don't know what to do about horses sitting on the side of the road with a carriage attached to their backs. Tents attached to catch their poop. It's hot and there are flies in their face. Stupid couples pay the old man to ride and all day. It doesn't lift my spirit into a higher plane than anyone else to think about that for a moment. I haven't done anything to make them any more free. But damn, did they think maybe the mom didn't want to have to work so hard to provide for her family? Maybe they could purchase their free time on their own sweat instead of hers. Buy their peace of mind on small heroics than her doing what she could and not big enough for them. Damn I hated Nan and Candy. Boyle was pretty ingenious the way she let the horse no good to what he could do for anyone else anymore. No breeding or stuff humans make horses do. The husband and daughter have written Mrs. Lombe off as better off dead because she's not a teenager anymore. (The one person who doesn't hold the horse up as a symbol of their own self pity was the one I felt had any connection. She did hers in talking about her father a lot. To feel she had had a family who loved her. It wasn't just show off useless applause.) It wasn't that that really got to me though. It's the way she starts talking to people as if she may as well be talking to herself. Bringing up stories that are way too late. The time she left a fourteen year old Nan by herself when they went on a vacation (I agreed that Nan would have hated a roughing it trip). As if she could talk them into seeing her side, that they hated her in the wrong. Damn. When she is used to their litany of hate but ashamed a stranger is witnessing her private pain. Boyle didn't connect all the dots in saying that's what she was doing. It's in how she keeps thinking she can still win her husband and daughter over. That maybe one day they'll see she was doing what had to be done. It was so damned unfair and just how it is. Some people think other people are disposable waste to walk on. That animals are symbols for them to talk big about. I wonder if Nancy will get to marry her rich husband. Maybe she'll die young and her children will dream about what their pretty mama must have been like. I know no one can do anything about people getting old and no one loving them anymore. About outgrowing your use and interest and maybe someone would think you were better off dead. But what really got to me was how much it hurt when the mother is going to have to AGAIN suck it up and do the hard job and she is going to hate her because someone has to be blamed for the way things are. I know I'd be too weak to save all the horses, anyway. But that'll never happen, in general, in universal truths. It hurts when it smacks you in the face anyway.
Anyway, I think Boyle is really good. She doesn't talk too much, lets her story breathe as if you felt the flies heading to the dead body all the time. It turns out I had this shelved to-read already. I read it after reading her translation of Crevel's Babylon. Her translation read more like THIS novel than a different translator of his Difficult Death did. The stream of consciousness style, poetry freedom. The way they ooze out in the dark. I love them both. I don't know how much of it was her. I am useless about pinning down, anyway. I don't think I really want to...
This is the illusion and the real time is night, and the condition not waking protest because I am lying in bed asleep with this letter held under the pillow in my hand.
June 30, 2022
Hoy hablaba con una amiga de que una creación literaria es más interesante cuanto más esconde en su interior algún secreto o misterio que no se explica, que no requiere explicación. En la magnífica novela ‘El caballo ciego’ el misterio, como en ‘Moby Dick’, ya está en el título, y mientras uno va leyendo la novela encuentra en el animal un símbolo de la dignidad, de la vida, de la voluntad o del destino, y de otras muchas cosas; es más, uno puede verse a sí mismo y hasta recordar a otros animales definitivamente misteriosos: el caballo de Turín al que Nietzsche se agarró antes de despeñarse por la locura o el perrete que asoma entre las negruras de Goya. Seguramente sea todo eso y, por tanto, realmente nada, es decir, la nada, como cuando “le quiebras la frente de un solo disparo como el puño de un hombre fuerte quiebra los frágiles paneles de una puerta para que entre la luz, y el constante sueño de la nada en su inconstante mundo de piel trémula, hombros elásticos y orejas elefantes se hace añicos ruidosamente, como cristal en la oscuridad”. No se entiende por qué la obra de Kay Boyle está prácticamente inédita en castellano.
September 23, 2017
Modernist, but less "difficult" than that might suggest. The writing is lush with sensory detail filtered through mostly interior POVs. It made me fully focus my attention and it drew me in completely. Probably the best place to start if you're interested in trying Boyle.
October 15, 2014
A quick note: if you're looking to track this down, you might instead look for Three Short Novels in which it was originally published. For some reason ND decided to pull it out and publish it on its own (from what I've read it's mostly just because it's so damn good that they felt it merited its own publication) - but now I'm feeling a bit cheated that I'm missing the other two stories it was originally packaged with.
Let's start by highlighting the quote on the back of the book:
This is family-as-battleground fiction - where every conversation is strung with tripwire and laced with landmines. Where the reader is dropped into a lifetime of resentments and shortcomings and a family stretched to the breaking point being stretched just a bit more over the decision to put down a blind horse. You have Nan (Nancy), the 17 year old daughter, who yearns to escape the shadow of youth and her (possibly entirely perceived) mother's perception of her as a child.
Let's start by highlighting the quote on the back of the book:
"The Crazy Hunter is the story closest to perfection that I have ever read."Now, don't get me wrong, I love me some hyperbole - I do - but I blanch a bit at using the word "perfection" in almost anything I write. That said, the quote is not far off. The short work here - I suppose it's a Novella, though, considering the title of its original publication, it might just be a very short novel (it's 139 pages long) – is, if nothing else, put together by a true master of short form fiction. It’s crafted much in the way one expects a short story to be put together – it feels like every word has been labored over by the author, where each sentence adds to work as a whole – mostly in building an escalating sense of tension throughout the work – and even in its craft it never feels overlabored or artificially constructed.-Katherine Anne Porter
This is family-as-battleground fiction - where every conversation is strung with tripwire and laced with landmines. Where the reader is dropped into a lifetime of resentments and shortcomings and a family stretched to the breaking point being stretched just a bit more over the decision to put down a blind horse. You have Nan (Nancy), the 17 year old daughter, who yearns to escape the shadow of youth and her (possibly entirely perceived) mother's perception of her as a child.
“You haven’t forgotten how to ride a horse.”You have Candy the drunkard father, the failed artist, the failed business man - resented by his wife but seemingly loved by Nan, further straining the tension between the three of them. And then you have Mrs. Lombe, the mother, the wife - I think her name is Edie, but it's interesting how rarely that comes up - the daughter is almost always Nan, and the father/husband is almost always Candy - but there is a buttoned up formality around the wife/mother character that even in presentation she is almost always addressed either through role (mother/wife) or formality (Mrs. Lombe). This setting aside is surely intentional; the isolation of Mrs. Lombe through textual representation is mirrored through her isolation of position within the family unit.
Nor have I forgotten to breathe or speak my native tongue, only how to walk into a house and through its rooms as if I belong there any longer, or swim in water that knew me young, or sit under this tree that knew my legs climbing up it once, or how to look at her and talk to her because she still talking Then and I am ahead in what there will be for me or in Now. I am home now, this is home, and there is no place for me because every place is taken by that child who will not die.
Ah, your incurable softness, your's and Nan's incurable false softness." said the mother in a low bitter voice. [...] "Keep that animal rotting in blindness out there all summer? What sort of sentimentality is it? For his health's sake, any horse must have his work-out, but you'd keep him closed out there with a step or two up the drive every day, and you'd break his heart and spirit for him! If you go on, you two," she said, holding onto the anger, "I'll put that crazy horse down myself, with my own hand I'll do it because I'm the only one here who'd have compassion to do it-"This work is brief but powerful – it manages to maintain a trembling tension for 139 pages, and only escalates as the story reaches its fairly unexpected conclusion - well worth tracking down.
May 3, 2024
"Si no se le puede devolver la vista a un caballo, no solo a este sino a cualquiera, al caballo de mejor y más fastuoso pedigrí, se le entrega a la muerte mediante un tercer ojo en la frente, se le ofrece un atisbo del paraíso a través de un agujerito de bordes negros".
February 20, 2013
The American Kay Boyle (1902-1992) may be one of the most unappreciated writers of the 20th century. Boyle spent much of her adult years in Europe, primarily France and Great Britain (thus her "British stories"), where she honed her fine writing skills.
Boyle's "Fifty Stories" is one of the finest collection of short stories I've read. These stories give credence to why she won the O.Henry prize for short story writing on two occasions.
In her novel "Crazy Hunter", Boyle stretches the story's tension like an elastic band, and when the story ends, the reader realizes Boyle has laid out much to contemplate.
Boyle's words in Crazy Hunter come in a small package, but a tour de force nevertheless......
Boyle's "Fifty Stories" is one of the finest collection of short stories I've read. These stories give credence to why she won the O.Henry prize for short story writing on two occasions.
In her novel "Crazy Hunter", Boyle stretches the story's tension like an elastic band, and when the story ends, the reader realizes Boyle has laid out much to contemplate.
Boyle's words in Crazy Hunter come in a small package, but a tour de force nevertheless......
December 5, 2023
This didn't grab me at first but soon she began doing interesting things with unspoken thoughts and interior voices, and then the ne'er-do-well father appeared to my relief. There are some sad, irritating, hard-headed things going on in this family and the British horsey set can be hard to warm up to. Nevertheless! the writing is excellent and the end of this novella one of the greatest endings I've read in a long time.
January 23, 2016
In R’s MFA class on point of view at the last residency, he used complex pieces from Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle, William Goyen, Rick Bass; the tale requires a fluid point of view, he said, they are representing states of mind and of being. Talking about Goyen’s short fiction in particular, he compared it to the experience of (the confrontation with) a painting which hits you all at once—Goyen tries to write this way, to have you experience it all at once, a mode of experience more representative of our lives than is narrative sequence. This is impossible to achieve, of course—painting in language—but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
I also am thinking of what Clarice Lispector said about her PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H., that this novel “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.” That’s an idea I felt rising in me while reading Kay Boyle’s novella THE CRAZY HUNTER, the opening few pages of which R used in his class. What are my demands as a writer, I was thinking, with this current novel project? Whose story is it and how should it be told? What layers of perspective might need to come in? Lots of churning began, and I don’t feel that the point is even being wholly capable of meeting those demands, but just trying to answer to them, to point yourself in that direction.
Boyle’s novella has an uncertain point of view and tries to welcome in several layers of consciousness at once; it moves in and out of memories and thoughts often without tags like “Nan thought” or “Candy remembered”—often the thoughts are undercurrents of dialog, what cannot be said but what is meant. Here is part of the opening when the mother and daughter—newly returned home for the summer from school abroad—are swimming:
“Then her arms began moving and she was swimming against the pouring current, the teeth shaking in her head with cold. So the last time I did this I was fifteen, two years back, she began thinking quickly against the rushing slabs of water. I hadn’t been away yet and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what it was yet. Now I can feel everything stopping, the heart, the blood, the muscles hardening as if I were working on my way through ice and becoming ice and the land and sky congealing tight around me. But the mother standing on her big bare legs on the grass saw the sun falling on the soft short hair that mounted black against the current, and the girl’s slim arms falling and rising… ‘How is it, Nan?’ she called out. ‘Cold?’ And now her own body slumped over and broke through the sedge and the reed-sweet into the stream’s fast deep bed… ‘Warm,’ she called peacefully across the water’s rapid murmuring. ‘Just the first plunge that takes your breath off…’
The way home takes it from you and doesn’t return it, the girl was saying, because every year of youth is still there in the furniture and the rugs and the marks on the glass. There is a school of children everywhere with me here, all of them that one child I was once running along the house’s east ivy-covered wall….” (4-5).
I don’t know what to make of the novella, really. The central conflict surrounds the hunter (a hunter is a breed of horse) who goes blind—should he be shot or saved—and the most moving moments for me are the opening swim and the moments when the girl takes the hunter, Brigand, out in the middle of the night, both of them with limited sight, to train him, to try to make him calm and useful. Also the ending is quite powerful, involving her emotional father (whom the mother considers a deadbeat, a drunk, a failed artist, but yet something more as well…the mother’s emotionality is the most muted and thus the most fierce) who rallies for the horse maybe on his daughter’s behalf but also by empathy and extension—“I too am useless,” he could be thinking, “so you will put me down too, will put me out of my misery…” I love the night-walks with Nan and horse because there is a blurring of human and animal. This awareness or consciousness about what makes us human happens elsewhere too, in slight moments, like when she remembers walking with a boy in Florence: “Arm in arm they walked, watching the ground move back beneath their feet, the road slipping back and away in the shade and the light and the shade from the trees as they walked small and human-voiced and human-limbed under the high fresh springing boughs” (42).
Here is a moment from the night-walks: “First the road that first night, she thought, and after that the grass and the water, and now the trees and what’s tripping him up underfoot to say Nothing has gone, blind horse, nothing has altered. When they were though it she stopped again at the edge and drew the mayblossom branches down over his face, gently drawing them down and gently letting them brush upward like veils of some inexplicable substitute for sight. That night she took him back by the marsh where by day the yellow iris could be seen growing, and he did not falter but sought his way with her through the invisible fragrant lilies in the dark” (76).
I also am thinking of what Clarice Lispector said about her PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H., that this novel “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.” That’s an idea I felt rising in me while reading Kay Boyle’s novella THE CRAZY HUNTER, the opening few pages of which R used in his class. What are my demands as a writer, I was thinking, with this current novel project? Whose story is it and how should it be told? What layers of perspective might need to come in? Lots of churning began, and I don’t feel that the point is even being wholly capable of meeting those demands, but just trying to answer to them, to point yourself in that direction.
Boyle’s novella has an uncertain point of view and tries to welcome in several layers of consciousness at once; it moves in and out of memories and thoughts often without tags like “Nan thought” or “Candy remembered”—often the thoughts are undercurrents of dialog, what cannot be said but what is meant. Here is part of the opening when the mother and daughter—newly returned home for the summer from school abroad—are swimming:
“Then her arms began moving and she was swimming against the pouring current, the teeth shaking in her head with cold. So the last time I did this I was fifteen, two years back, she began thinking quickly against the rushing slabs of water. I hadn’t been away yet and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what it was yet. Now I can feel everything stopping, the heart, the blood, the muscles hardening as if I were working on my way through ice and becoming ice and the land and sky congealing tight around me. But the mother standing on her big bare legs on the grass saw the sun falling on the soft short hair that mounted black against the current, and the girl’s slim arms falling and rising… ‘How is it, Nan?’ she called out. ‘Cold?’ And now her own body slumped over and broke through the sedge and the reed-sweet into the stream’s fast deep bed… ‘Warm,’ she called peacefully across the water’s rapid murmuring. ‘Just the first plunge that takes your breath off…’
The way home takes it from you and doesn’t return it, the girl was saying, because every year of youth is still there in the furniture and the rugs and the marks on the glass. There is a school of children everywhere with me here, all of them that one child I was once running along the house’s east ivy-covered wall….” (4-5).
I don’t know what to make of the novella, really. The central conflict surrounds the hunter (a hunter is a breed of horse) who goes blind—should he be shot or saved—and the most moving moments for me are the opening swim and the moments when the girl takes the hunter, Brigand, out in the middle of the night, both of them with limited sight, to train him, to try to make him calm and useful. Also the ending is quite powerful, involving her emotional father (whom the mother considers a deadbeat, a drunk, a failed artist, but yet something more as well…the mother’s emotionality is the most muted and thus the most fierce) who rallies for the horse maybe on his daughter’s behalf but also by empathy and extension—“I too am useless,” he could be thinking, “so you will put me down too, will put me out of my misery…” I love the night-walks with Nan and horse because there is a blurring of human and animal. This awareness or consciousness about what makes us human happens elsewhere too, in slight moments, like when she remembers walking with a boy in Florence: “Arm in arm they walked, watching the ground move back beneath their feet, the road slipping back and away in the shade and the light and the shade from the trees as they walked small and human-voiced and human-limbed under the high fresh springing boughs” (42).
Here is a moment from the night-walks: “First the road that first night, she thought, and after that the grass and the water, and now the trees and what’s tripping him up underfoot to say Nothing has gone, blind horse, nothing has altered. When they were though it she stopped again at the edge and drew the mayblossom branches down over his face, gently drawing them down and gently letting them brush upward like veils of some inexplicable substitute for sight. That night she took him back by the marsh where by day the yellow iris could be seen growing, and he did not falter but sought his way with her through the invisible fragrant lilies in the dark” (76).
July 11, 2022
La familia Lombe se dedica a la cría de caballos .
La madre, (no sabremos su nombre) es la dueña del dinero y experta criadora y no está de acuerdo con ninguna de las decisiones que toma su marido.
El padre(Candy) es un artista, sensible, que ha fracasado y que convertido en alcohólico derrocha el dinero de su mujer.
La hija (Nancy) , recién llegada de Florencia desea que termine el verano y poder irse de nuevo a vivir su vida. Su padre acaba de regalarle un caballo, Brigand.
El problema es que Candy lo ha comprado sin tener ni idea de caballos y la madre que es la experta cuando descubre que no tiene certificado y que está castrado se opone a mantenerlo. La tensión aumenta cuando se descubre que el caballo es ciego y tanto el veterinario como la madre opinan que es necesario sacrificarlo porque no les sirve para nada.
Nancy quiere salvarlo y para ello lo entrena incansablemente para demostrar que merece una oportunidad.
El padre quiere que su hija cumpla todos sus deseos pero por otro lado tiene miedo de que montar a Brigand suponga una caída y le ocurra algo malo a Nancy.
El enfrentamiento en torno a qué hacer con el caballo no es el único enfrentamiento.
La hija se enfrenta a sí misma y a su madre porque sueña con lograr su independencia pero no quiere enfrentarse abiertamente a ella que quiere que se quede alli y continúe con el negocio.
El padre se enfrenta a si mismo intentando superar su fracaso. Y pretende enfrentarse a la madre, por despecho quizá, poniéndose del lado de la hija.
La madre con una fría, pragmática y autoritaria personalidad dueña de un negocio que produce sus frutos quiere imponer su voluntad. Y se enfrenta a todo y a todos para lograrlo.
Breve, concisa, nada le sobra ni le falta para crear una tensión constante en una, en aparente, sencilla narración pero tremendamente profunda en la que se van mostrando las personalidades de cada personaje y aspectos de su vida pasada que ayudan a entender por qué cada uno es como es y por qué ninguno tiene la razón absoluta.
Lo romántico y lo práctico, el pasado y el presente, los deseos y las obligaciones... Desde luego en pocas páginas da para pensar mucho.
Maravillosa.
La madre, (no sabremos su nombre) es la dueña del dinero y experta criadora y no está de acuerdo con ninguna de las decisiones que toma su marido.
El padre(Candy) es un artista, sensible, que ha fracasado y que convertido en alcohólico derrocha el dinero de su mujer.
La hija (Nancy) , recién llegada de Florencia desea que termine el verano y poder irse de nuevo a vivir su vida. Su padre acaba de regalarle un caballo, Brigand.
El problema es que Candy lo ha comprado sin tener ni idea de caballos y la madre que es la experta cuando descubre que no tiene certificado y que está castrado se opone a mantenerlo. La tensión aumenta cuando se descubre que el caballo es ciego y tanto el veterinario como la madre opinan que es necesario sacrificarlo porque no les sirve para nada.
Nancy quiere salvarlo y para ello lo entrena incansablemente para demostrar que merece una oportunidad.
El padre quiere que su hija cumpla todos sus deseos pero por otro lado tiene miedo de que montar a Brigand suponga una caída y le ocurra algo malo a Nancy.
El enfrentamiento en torno a qué hacer con el caballo no es el único enfrentamiento.
La hija se enfrenta a sí misma y a su madre porque sueña con lograr su independencia pero no quiere enfrentarse abiertamente a ella que quiere que se quede alli y continúe con el negocio.
El padre se enfrenta a si mismo intentando superar su fracaso. Y pretende enfrentarse a la madre, por despecho quizá, poniéndose del lado de la hija.
La madre con una fría, pragmática y autoritaria personalidad dueña de un negocio que produce sus frutos quiere imponer su voluntad. Y se enfrenta a todo y a todos para lograrlo.
Breve, concisa, nada le sobra ni le falta para crear una tensión constante en una, en aparente, sencilla narración pero tremendamente profunda en la que se van mostrando las personalidades de cada personaje y aspectos de su vida pasada que ayudan a entender por qué cada uno es como es y por qué ninguno tiene la razón absoluta.
Lo romántico y lo práctico, el pasado y el presente, los deseos y las obligaciones... Desde luego en pocas páginas da para pensar mucho.
Maravillosa.
February 9, 2023
Me ha gustado mucho, mucho. Una historia con mucha tensión, personajes magníficos en ese triángulo familiar asfixiante y grandes metáforas. Lo acabé con el corazón en la garganta. Muy fuerte que sepamos tan poco de Kay Boyle, una mujer con una vida y obra tan importantes. Estaré atenta porque me encantaría seguir leyéndola.
July 19, 2023
mucho caballo
July 9, 2020
Reminds me of a domesticated version of Hawkes’ The Lime Twig – like his work, the prose is modernist, dark and heavy and clotted, but where the horse in that book was a sinewy mass of erotic energy that seduces and ruins the various lowlifes involved with it, the horse in this novel is the pivotal signifier in a quasi-Freudian struggle between a failed-artist father, castrating-pragmatist mother and a daughter just coming to a wild (that is, artistic) maturity. The titular hunter-class horse is bought by the father for an exorbitant price in a lurch of impotent alcoholic rage and goes blind after some kind of obscure stroke at the story’s beginning. Its blindness turns it into the subject of a row between the mother, who sees the horse as a dangerous and useless expenditure and wants to kill it, and the daughter, who secretly trains the horse in the dark of rural night and density of British rain.
The new, alien sensory being of the horse becomes a fascination for her, as does, implicitly, its sheer uselessness (Boyle accents this by making the animal a gelding); her obsession with the horse runs parallel to a desire to return to The Big (Continental) City she has just come home from, to make her roots with the poets and painters. The mother crusades against the horse on the side of sight and good capitalist sense, whose only possible response to alterity is its annihilation (“You are no longer sightless, [because] you are dead”, the daughter imagines her mother saying to the horse), and crusades against her daughter’s ideas in much the same way. With the failed-painter father’s eventual intervention on the side of the horse against the mother, it threatens to be a simple accursed share vs. utilitarian accounting parable. In the novel’s worst bit, Boyle puts a polemic to this end in the father’s mouth, who declaims that the horse has “something to do with love as it works out against this empire building and this suppression of the native”. He is drunk, but it’s no excuse.
The unique force of this novel, and the reason that it’s worth reading, comes from the close attention to the horse’s bodily presence that makes its version of the accursed share a veritably physically-felt one. Whenever the horse draws close to being a cardboard prop in a philosophical debate, as it would be in a worse book, Boyle returns us to its physical being and its sensory world: “she thought of the horse’s unwritten, unrecorded, uncommitted world of sight and hearing, touch and smell, the horse’s moving world of myriad credulous sensation”. The long, languorously-described training scenes in the dark foster a sensation of utter textual oneness with the horse’s breathing and bodily grace. Though her successful training of the horse may suggest its integration with the world of sight and capitalistic usefulness, and thus a kind of flattening, the calamitous end of the story makes it clear that the horse cannot be fought for on these terms. Against the conservative resymbolizing efforts of the father’s climactic speech, he refers to the horse as a “horse, if he’s a horse any more” – the crazy hunter’s powers flow beyond a symbolic resolution, beyond any system, toward an irrecoverable exteriority that cannot be tamed, only loved and brought into the closest (im)possible communion.
The new, alien sensory being of the horse becomes a fascination for her, as does, implicitly, its sheer uselessness (Boyle accents this by making the animal a gelding); her obsession with the horse runs parallel to a desire to return to The Big (Continental) City she has just come home from, to make her roots with the poets and painters. The mother crusades against the horse on the side of sight and good capitalist sense, whose only possible response to alterity is its annihilation (“You are no longer sightless, [because] you are dead”, the daughter imagines her mother saying to the horse), and crusades against her daughter’s ideas in much the same way. With the failed-painter father’s eventual intervention on the side of the horse against the mother, it threatens to be a simple accursed share vs. utilitarian accounting parable. In the novel’s worst bit, Boyle puts a polemic to this end in the father’s mouth, who declaims that the horse has “something to do with love as it works out against this empire building and this suppression of the native”. He is drunk, but it’s no excuse.
The unique force of this novel, and the reason that it’s worth reading, comes from the close attention to the horse’s bodily presence that makes its version of the accursed share a veritably physically-felt one. Whenever the horse draws close to being a cardboard prop in a philosophical debate, as it would be in a worse book, Boyle returns us to its physical being and its sensory world: “she thought of the horse’s unwritten, unrecorded, uncommitted world of sight and hearing, touch and smell, the horse’s moving world of myriad credulous sensation”. The long, languorously-described training scenes in the dark foster a sensation of utter textual oneness with the horse’s breathing and bodily grace. Though her successful training of the horse may suggest its integration with the world of sight and capitalistic usefulness, and thus a kind of flattening, the calamitous end of the story makes it clear that the horse cannot be fought for on these terms. Against the conservative resymbolizing efforts of the father’s climactic speech, he refers to the horse as a “horse, if he’s a horse any more” – the crazy hunter’s powers flow beyond a symbolic resolution, beyond any system, toward an irrecoverable exteriority that cannot be tamed, only loved and brought into the closest (im)possible communion.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 16, 2008
I remember the names of authors, but not always the titles, and so it's not surprising that I bring home library books only to discover after reading a few pages that I've read it before. Not so with this book; it was so memorable that I remembered the whole story upon reading the first sentence. I can't recommend it highly enough. On the back cover, Katharine Anne Porter is quoted as saying "The story is the closest to perfection that I have ever read". I couldn't agree more.
April 14, 2016
Bought this book in a collection because I found it cheap and it sounded interesting. I was right. Never even heard of Kay Boyle before reading this and I'm happy to find my three dollars was well spent. Her writing is very sharp. Her characters are people you know. The story is simple on the surface, but complex in the depths. It ends exactly when it needs to and leaves you thinking.
October 14, 2007
Quite good but hard to read while for instance tired since it is so dense. Everything is almost stream of consciousness and a little difficult to parse. I like the ending. Endings are hard to do well.
July 4, 2023
i'd never heard of Kay Boyle until i stumbled across her name in Jessica Mitford's letters--published by i cannot recall who... in any case, i am reading that book and stopping to read the authors that she mentions or looking up the cases and things that come up, since otherwise it would be a meaningless read. it isn't, this way. i have read Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death and Hons and Rebels, as well as Nancy Mitford's first four novels; i have learned about certain figures and events that were important in the second half of the 20th century in the US from the perspective of a person who either lived through them, or observed them very carefully from a politically committed position. and in Europe, too, in the first half. and i learned about Kay Boyle.
and i looked her up in the Alexandria of our times (zlibrary), and there's nothing there except for this book (which is the Spanish translation of The Crazy Hunter), and her life in letters. i want to read the latter, but i am afraid to, since i will want to read her novels and stories and memoirs and poems as they're mentioned, and i might not be able to, since the world of letters has largely forgotten this amazing writer...
at the end of El Caballo Ciego somebody tries to explain why Boyle has been forgotten--her subjects were too European for an American audience removed by time, as any next generation is from what the previous generation experienced or at least, read in the papers--but i am not sure that it makes sense to me. Edith Wharton also wrote of things too European, and she has not been forgotten... i mean, not every single one of Boyle's books has a European subject--this one takes place in England but it's not a "European" book at all... perhaps she was too intense? because this book is Intense. the characters are too intense to be real, but this does not detract from the novella, even for a reader like me who is into characters more than anything, especially very real characters who then move into the universe inside my mind and people it. oh, these guys are all insane! and the horse! i am afraid of horses, like the girl's father, they are huge and can kill you unwittingly and out of sheer bigness and weight. but this horse i absolutely loved.
a fascinating, fascinating book. and the writing was absolutely beautiful, even in translation. absolutely beautiful
and i looked her up in the Alexandria of our times (zlibrary), and there's nothing there except for this book (which is the Spanish translation of The Crazy Hunter), and her life in letters. i want to read the latter, but i am afraid to, since i will want to read her novels and stories and memoirs and poems as they're mentioned, and i might not be able to, since the world of letters has largely forgotten this amazing writer...
at the end of El Caballo Ciego somebody tries to explain why Boyle has been forgotten--her subjects were too European for an American audience removed by time, as any next generation is from what the previous generation experienced or at least, read in the papers--but i am not sure that it makes sense to me. Edith Wharton also wrote of things too European, and she has not been forgotten... i mean, not every single one of Boyle's books has a European subject--this one takes place in England but it's not a "European" book at all... perhaps she was too intense? because this book is Intense. the characters are too intense to be real, but this does not detract from the novella, even for a reader like me who is into characters more than anything, especially very real characters who then move into the universe inside my mind and people it. oh, these guys are all insane! and the horse! i am afraid of horses, like the girl's father, they are huge and can kill you unwittingly and out of sheer bigness and weight. but this horse i absolutely loved.
a fascinating, fascinating book. and the writing was absolutely beautiful, even in translation. absolutely beautiful
May 15, 2024
«Madre, tú puedes tocar estas cosas, tú puedes tocar la muerte y después limpiártela de las manos con un pañuelo, y tocar el dolor sin arredrarte, pero ya no puedes abrazarme cuando estoy contigo y tengo miedo».
¿Qué ocurre cuando todo parece tranquilo y en paz y, por dentro, sientes que está a punto para saltar por los aires? Que solo falta encender la mecha para que explote todo.
Esto es lo que sienten los protagonistas de esta novela: un matrimonio y su hija, que, aparentemente, aunque tienen todo para ser felices, se sienten vacíos y solos. Esta es una historia que trata, principalmente, los conflictos familiares.
La madre se queja de que su marido sea un borracho y desperdicie su dinero pero, sobre todo, de que necesite sentirse superior a ella. La hija se queja de que su madre no se preocupa por ella ni le permita alcanzar sus sueños. Y, por último, el padre se siente infeliz porque no le gustan los caballos (el negocio familiar) y ha fracasado en la pintura, lo que realmente daba sentido a su vida.
Pero también es, ante todo, una historia sobre los privilegios de clase. La mujer se sitúa por encima de su marido y su hija porque es la que tiene el dinero (el poder) en esa casa y la capacidad de ordenarles lo que deben hacer (e, incluso, ser). De ahí ese vacío que sienten los personajes, esa necesidad de ser vistos, queridos y tenidos en cuenta.
También descartaría el impecable estilo de la autora, los continuos cambios de narración de tercera a primera persona, que le permiten profundizar en los pensamientos de los personajes. Algo que hace que la novela sea más intimista e introspectiva todavía y que pese más lo que no se dice que lo que se dice. Los silencios y lo que se insinúa es lo que más importa; y es muy difícil conseguir esto.
Tengo su selección de relatos ('Vivir es lo mejor') en casa y espero leerlos pronto porque me ha encantado la forma de escribir de esta autora y, sobre todo, la manera de retratar a sus personajes hasta sacar lo mejor y lo peor de sí mismos, sus más profundas vulnerabilidades y miedos.
¿Qué ocurre cuando todo parece tranquilo y en paz y, por dentro, sientes que está a punto para saltar por los aires? Que solo falta encender la mecha para que explote todo.
Esto es lo que sienten los protagonistas de esta novela: un matrimonio y su hija, que, aparentemente, aunque tienen todo para ser felices, se sienten vacíos y solos. Esta es una historia que trata, principalmente, los conflictos familiares.
La madre se queja de que su marido sea un borracho y desperdicie su dinero pero, sobre todo, de que necesite sentirse superior a ella. La hija se queja de que su madre no se preocupa por ella ni le permita alcanzar sus sueños. Y, por último, el padre se siente infeliz porque no le gustan los caballos (el negocio familiar) y ha fracasado en la pintura, lo que realmente daba sentido a su vida.
Pero también es, ante todo, una historia sobre los privilegios de clase. La mujer se sitúa por encima de su marido y su hija porque es la que tiene el dinero (el poder) en esa casa y la capacidad de ordenarles lo que deben hacer (e, incluso, ser). De ahí ese vacío que sienten los personajes, esa necesidad de ser vistos, queridos y tenidos en cuenta.
También descartaría el impecable estilo de la autora, los continuos cambios de narración de tercera a primera persona, que le permiten profundizar en los pensamientos de los personajes. Algo que hace que la novela sea más intimista e introspectiva todavía y que pese más lo que no se dice que lo que se dice. Los silencios y lo que se insinúa es lo que más importa; y es muy difícil conseguir esto.
Tengo su selección de relatos ('Vivir es lo mejor') en casa y espero leerlos pronto porque me ha encantado la forma de escribir de esta autora y, sobre todo, la manera de retratar a sus personajes hasta sacar lo mejor y lo peor de sí mismos, sus más profundas vulnerabilidades y miedos.
September 13, 2022
"El caballo ciego" de Kayle Boyle es una joya injustamente poco conocida. Me compré el libro tras leer una crítica de José María Guelbenzu, en Babelia, que la elogiaba sin reservas. Pues bien, tengo que decir que la crítica hace justicia a esta maravilla de tan sólo 168 páginas. El argumento es sencillo: una joven se obceca en mantener con vida a su caballo, tras quedar repentinamente ciego, a pesar de la recomendación de su madre, veterinarios y cuidadores de sacrificar al animal. Este sencillo argumento da pie a la autora a describir al triángulo protagonista (Nan, la propietaria del caballo, Caby, su pusilánime padre y su autoritaria madre de la que no conocemos el nombre). Con una prosa preciosista que alterna la voz del narrador con magníficos monólogos interiores que nos muestran las aristas de los personajes mejor que cualquier descripción. La acción transcurre de manera pausada hasta llevarnos al magnífico desenlace.
Uno sabe que un libro es especial cuando lo abre por una página al azar y puede disfrutar de la lectura de unos párrafos, saboreándolos con independencia del argumento. Os aseguro que en este caso podéis hacerlo con cualquiera de sus 168 páginas.
Uno sabe que un libro es especial cuando lo abre por una página al azar y puede disfrutar de la lectura de unos párrafos, saboreándolos con independencia del argumento. Os aseguro que en este caso podéis hacerlo con cualquiera de sus 168 páginas.
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November 3, 2022No me ha sido fácil leer esto, así que me lo he ido dosificando. La novela está muy bien. Es muy buen libro con reflexiones magníficas, pero cuando leía la palabra bocado, la palabra silla, la palabra rienda, no podía evitar salirme de la lectura. Con sus contradicciones y todo (creer que cepillar a un caballo es una forma de cuidar al animal como cuando a las mujeres nos dicen que cuidarnos es ir a hacernos las uñas), habla con un respeto hacia estos seres difícil de encontrar en esa época. Por otro lado, me podría haber sido fácil identificarme con Nancy o Candy, pero no sé cómo lo ha hecho Kay Boyle, que finalmente con quien más me he identificado es con el caballo.
Os dejo uno de mis párrafos preferidos de la novela: ♥️
“Quizá se deba a que no me interesa lo más mínimo demostrarles, ni a ellos ni a nadie, que mando yo. No me gusta obligar a nadie a que me obedezca y esa es la razón de que no me guste ir al establo ni tener mucha relación con los caballos. No me importa que este amigo de aquí detrás nos acompañe porque no es arrogante como la mayoría, pero no me apartaría de mi camino...”
Os dejo uno de mis párrafos preferidos de la novela: ♥️
“Quizá se deba a que no me interesa lo más mínimo demostrarles, ni a ellos ni a nadie, que mando yo. No me gusta obligar a nadie a que me obedezca y esa es la razón de que no me guste ir al establo ni tener mucha relación con los caballos. No me importa que este amigo de aquí detrás nos acompañe porque no es arrogante como la mayoría, pero no me apartaría de mi camino...”
August 20, 2019
This is the story of a rich, spoiled, teenage girl who has a rich mother, and a drunken "useless" father who makes rash purchases when he's drinking.
It's the summer, when young Nancy has come home from boarding school when she finds a beautiful"Hunter" gelded horse in the stables that her father had bought without checking the pedigree. As she's walking with him one day, he suddenly goes blind. She's determined to train him to run and jump like a sighted horse, but her mother is dead set on "putting him down."
P.39
" 'Ah, don't make fun of him!' she said in sudden pain. 'Everyone ridiculing him and jeering at him as if he were the stable freak simply because he isn't to sire or foal or isn't a colt, or isn't to train, or hasn't a single action he's expected to perform! Simply to look the fool and hack around, but I didn't think you'd feel that about him --' "
Clearly the author's allusion to the father, as well, as he hasn't any of his own money, and does absolutely nothing to "earn his keep" in the family's horse-breeding business.
It's the summer, when young Nancy has come home from boarding school when she finds a beautiful"Hunter" gelded horse in the stables that her father had bought without checking the pedigree. As she's walking with him one day, he suddenly goes blind. She's determined to train him to run and jump like a sighted horse, but her mother is dead set on "putting him down."
P.39
" 'Ah, don't make fun of him!' she said in sudden pain. 'Everyone ridiculing him and jeering at him as if he were the stable freak simply because he isn't to sire or foal or isn't a colt, or isn't to train, or hasn't a single action he's expected to perform! Simply to look the fool and hack around, but I didn't think you'd feel that about him --' "
Clearly the author's allusion to the father, as well, as he hasn't any of his own money, and does absolutely nothing to "earn his keep" in the family's horse-breeding business.
June 18, 2025
Una novela que habla de la compleja dinámica de las familias, cuando la familia es un campo de batalla en busca de la identidad y la libertad. La señora Lombe, un personaje tan común en cientos de familias, se lamenta de los errores del marido, pero permite su autodestrucción, ¿por qué? Su queja, esa negatividad que se calza, evita la responsabilidad, perpetuando la codependencia de la pareja. Y en medio de este ambiente tóxico, surge Nan, y aquí el caballo ciego adquiere una relevancia indiscutible, el caballo como protesta y enfrentamiento a su madre, como apoyo a su padre, simboliza su lucha por la independencia. Nan es consciente de la manipulación de su madre, una mujer que ha mermado a su padre hasta convertirlo en un alcohólico y en un artista frustrado que no reconoce su talento. Una obra de apariencia sencilla, pero donde hay que arañar la superficie porque esta cargada de observaciones muy agudas sobre las relaciones familiares más complejas y la manipulación más sutil.
¡Feliz lectura!
¡Feliz lectura!
September 14, 2025
I have divergent feelings about this book, which stimulated one of the longer discussions about any book in the book group. I admire it a lot. The writing is wonderfully evocative; as a portrait of a family, Boyle draws you into the relationships between daughter, mother and father, on Display through the mechanism of the daughter’s blind horse. Obviously, it should be put down, for what is good for a horse that can’t work, whose purpose in life has been stolen. Yet Nan truly believes she can train the horse into a purposeful life. Certainly a metaphor for her own place as a 17 year old about to step into adulthood. Mother seeks the horse’s death; father, steeped in his own sense of failure, wants to at least be loved by his daughter. Yet this is all that Boyle gives us. Perhaps this is the point; that as powerful as belief can be, it is a flimsy charade cast against the power of the everyday. Nothing really changes for this family, despite some dramatic actions. A somewhat depressing message wrapped in gorgeous, elegant and evocative writing.
December 4, 2024
The Crazy Hunter by Kay Boyle is a story exploring the themes of pride, compassion, and family conflict. That said, it left me cold. The prose is dense, with sentences so long and wordy that reading them felt more like a chore than a pleasure. Perhaps this reflects the style of the time in which it was written, but it made the story feel distant, inaccessible, and unnecessarily obscure. Additionally, none of the characters are particularly likable, making it hard to fully invest in their struggles or outcomes. As someone who isn’t a horse enthusiast, I found myself bored with much of the story’s focus. While I can understand why it’s considered a significant work, it simply didn’t resonate with me.
July 4, 2022
I actually read this in Boyle's Three Short Novels book, but am compelled to give my review here. Wonderful writing but very stressful topic. My thoughts are probably clouded by having preceded this book with another book by a different author featuring an equally horrible domineering woman. The Crazy Hunter was just more than I could stomach. If it were not for the redeeming qualities of Nan and Candy, I would not have finished. This is the only book out of hundreds that I've read where I read the ending before finishing. It was very stressful and potentially heartbreaking. Worth reading, but beware.
November 23, 2022
Precioso relato corto, muy intimista. Centrado en la protagonista, Nancy Lombe, a la que regalan un caballo que se queda ciego. Su severa madre, criadora profesional de caballos, considera que mantener un caballo así es inútil y decide sacrificarlo. La protagonista se rebela, intentando instruir al caballo para demostrar que, a pesar de su ceguera, es capaz de poder realizar una carrera. Un relato donde se mezclan sentimientos como el amor, la impotencia, la determinación para demostrar las ideas propias, y la dignidad, plasmada en la figura del propio caballo. Muy recomendable.
July 13, 2025
Se trata de un libro especial, no sólo en la historia, si no también en la forma de explicarla. Resulta un poco difícil al principio, pero después coges el hilo de cada personaje y su propósito. No me ha desagradado, ha sido una experiencia distinta con un mensaje que llega a través de un caballo ciego...
August 9, 2017
EXCELLENT READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
January 21, 2020
Absolutely loved this tale and am so glad Anne Boyd Rioux recommended it to me!
April 29, 2023
Demasiadas vueltas en la historia sin ir al grano para acabar para mi gusto mal
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 4, 2024
Not saying is a bad book (it has really good reviews and actually that's the reason why I read the book), but just not for me. This is not the type of literature that makes me enjoy reading.
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