Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
November 28th, 2009
Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
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Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Traveler’s Literary Companions) $7.50 Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion has been compiled in an attempt to provide tourists with a different perspective on the country. Each of the twenty-six remarkable stories in this collection has been selected to reflect the geographical area in which it is set. (Though Costa Rica is only about half the size of Ireland, it is wonderfully diverse.) Story settings range from the high… |
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Costa Rica : a traveler’s literary companion … |
This book came out in 1993 and was one of the first publications in this traveler’s literary companion series, a beautiful attempt to introduce a wide range of foreign writers to English-language readers. It contained 26 works by 20 writers. There were 23 short stories and 3 excerpts from novels.
The oldest writers in the collection were Carmen Lyra (1888-1949), Mario González Feo (1897-1969) and Max Jiménez (1900-47). The most recent were Alfonso Chase (1945-), Alfredo Aguilar (1959-) and Uriel Quesada (1962-). Others included Carlos Luis Fallas (1909-65), a writer of the working class and social protest who’s been called one of the nation’s most widely read authors; Yolanda Oreamuno (1916-56); Joaquín Gutiérrez (1918-2000); Fabián Dobles (1918-97) and Julieta Pinto (1922-), who were called major voices; Carmen Naranjo (1928-), who appears to be among the writers most frequently translated into English; Abel Pacheco (1933-), recently the nation’s president; and Quince Duncan (1940-), who was described as a chronicler of Costa Rica’s blacks. Of all the authors, five were women.
As far as could be determined, the pieces ranged from the 1930s (Lyra, Jiménez, Oreamuno) to the 1990s (Naranjo, Chase). Three-fourths of the works came from the 1960s to 90s, the rest from the 1930s and 40s.
The works covered the north and south, the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, the capital/the central valley, and a mountainous area in the north. A final section contained stories on the nation as a whole and was one of the strongest sections. In general, the longer pieces were most enjoyed.
The introduction provided little background on the nation’s literary development. Judging from info on the Internet, the modern literature dates to the late 1800s. Trends over the following decades have included influence from European literary traditions; an opposing preference for local themes; nationalism and social protest; modernism (with less impact than elsewhere in Latin America); realism; and occasionally magical realism.
A number of the stories in the collection showed a great sensitivity to nature, focusing on the harvesting of fan palms, the screeching of cicadas, tropical rain, steam rising from the earth, the sound, smell and taste of the sea, as well as descriptions of trees, flowers, frogs, birds and lizards (Jiménez, Oreamuno, Quesada, Dobles, Rima de Vallbona, Aguilar, Naranjo, Fallas).
A few employed magical realism — applying to reality some exaggeration and absurdity, or blending hallucination and reality (Jiménez, Oreamuno, Naranjo, Aguilar). Others drew attention directly or in passing to social inequity or untoward foreign influence (Lyra, Dobles, Vallbona, José León Sánchez, Pacheco). One of these, by Sánchez, was written from the point of view of a young girl trying to escape poverty and showed well the many obstacles: lack of health, sanitation, nutrition, money, learning, sexual education, role models, and protection from those who meant harm.
Another piece (Ducoudray) managed to combine protest with magical realism, in the form of mysterious pairs of wings brought by an unnamed company from overseas 90 years before, which claimed occasional victims and spread contagious diseases. Other stories were concerned more with urban alienation and sexual frustration (Samuel Rovinski) or the inability to fathom another person’s motivations (Chase).
Stylistically, among the more interesting pieces for this reader were one by Dobles, in the form of a diary kept by two Americans competing against an unnamed fruit conglomerate in the early 1900s. One by Pacheco, in the form of voices telling their stories in a manner akin to Spoon River Anthology. And a monologue by Gutiérrez, in which a man at the end of his rope recounted his adventures and rued the passing of time.
In one connection or another, a handful of the stories mentioned the unnamed conglomerate, which the introduction identified as the American-owned United Fruit Company. One of the largest employers in Central America before World War II, it appears also in the pages of authors like Asturias, Neruda and García Márquez. In the present collection, it was shown building railroads to the interior, setting up company towns, driving small competitors out of business, and buying on favorable terms from local banana farmers. An excerpt in the collection from a novel by Fallas–Mamita Yunai (1941)–showed the comradeship of the hard-working construction gangs it employed.
Readers who enjoy all these things ought to enjoy this collection, it’s fine as a travel guide, and it’s a very useful introduction to the nation’s writing over the 20th century, for which there appear to be no other widely available collections in English.
There wasn’t the social satire of writers like Brazil’s Machado de Assis or Mexico’s Juan José Arreola, the concern with humorous tales and social customs of Peru’s Ricardo Palma and the Dominican Republic’s Juan Bosch, or the concern with Indian subjects of a writer like Mexico’s Rosario Castellanos. The tragic sense of life in some of the pieces wasn’t conveyed quite as powerfully for this reader as in the best writing of Uruguay’s Horacio Quiroga, Brazil’s Graciliano Ramos or Mexico’s Juan Rulfo. And other pieces weren’t as dazzling as the best magical realism from writers of the 1960s boom like Fuentes and Cortázar, a precursor such as Borges and successors like Puig and Arenas, or experimental on the order of Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, or Sarduy. Still, there was much to enjoy.
Other collections containing Costa Rican writers include When New Flowers Bloomed: Short Stories by Women Writers from Costa Rica and Panama (1991) and Contemporary Short Stories from Central America (1994).
Rating: 3 / 5
Comment by Reader in Tokyo — November 28, 2009 @ 7:22 am
I purchased this book before a trip to Costa Rica, read it and then read it again when I got back. The stories are fabulous, well-written, and give a wonderful insight into this glorious country. I will probably read it again.
Rating: 5 / 5
Comment by recycled hippie — November 28, 2009 @ 9:11 am
A good read when visiting the country. I enjoyed/understood the stories much more when I visited Costa Rica and therefore the context in which they were written albeit that many of the stories were written in the earier part of the 20th century. Short stories were a good idea when travelling around
Rating: 3 / 5
Comment by P. Johnston — November 28, 2009 @ 10:53 am
BEFORE TRAVELLING overseas, I always try and read some literature from the places I’m visiting, so I certainly applaud the spirit of the “Traveler’s Literary Companion” series. As there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Costa Rican literature available in translation, this anthology is invaluable. However, I’m afraid I didn’t find it as illuminating as the reviewers below. While the idea of grouping the 26 short stories by geographical region sounds like a good idea, in practice, I didn’t find regional differences embodied in the stories to be distinctive enough to warant such arrangement. Perhaps a better grouping would have been coastal, inland, mountainous, and urban, I’m not sure. Another possible reason I might not have found the selections very evocative is their length. There are 26 stories by 20 authors (six have two stories in the collection) over 220 pages, so one gets more a sense of vignettes with fleeting impressions than a solid sense of what the people or places are like. The one aspect that does appear in the many of the stories is the importance of nature in Costa Rica, both as a source of beauty and as something to struggle against.
Rating: 3 / 5
Comment by A. Ross — November 28, 2009 @ 10:58 am
The two most invaluable books I read prior to vactioning in Costa Rica were this one, and a social history with magnificent photos called, “Costa Rica: The Last Country the Gods Made. “The funny thing is that they compliment each other almost exactly in their selection of the geographical areas in Costa Rica that they both chose to explore; so you can read the essay, “Travels from the Interior” in “Last Country” then read the corresponding short story set in the highlands of the central plateau in “Literary Companion”! I read both books alternating back and forth like that. . . . talk about opening up the country before your eyes!
Rating: 5 / 5
Comment by G. Phelps — November 28, 2009 @ 1:34 pm