Introduction (to translation of Rodrigo Rey Rosa's Severina)

Readers who look to Central American literature for baroque exuberance, perhaps with the prestigious precedent of Miguel Angel Asturias in mind, are likely to be surprised by the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa. His fiction is the opposite of lush: generally spare in style, restrained in its exploration of the characters' inner worlds, and elliptical in structure. Moreover it tends to be somber in tone. These descriptive formulas might, in North America, suggest that Rey Rosa belongs to the numerous offspring of Hemingway, but that would be a somewhat misleading impression, for he is not a writer who begins from a secure (if bleak) sense of how things really are. In the fiction of Rey Rosa the lineaments of the real cannot be taken for granted. It is true that his settings have gradually become more particular and identifiable, and that the fantastic and speculative elements that marked his first three books" The Beggar's Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, and The Pelcari Project, all translated into English by Paul Bowles" have since receded. Nevertheless, dream, fantasy, and hallucination still threaten the stability of the worlds in which his characters live. In this regard, Rey Rosa remains fruitfully in debt to the writer whose work revealed his vocation: Jorge Luis Borges.