Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) is one of the greatest and most original short-story writers in the past century.
Hernández is known for his bizarre tales of quietly deranged individuals who inject their obsessions into everyday life. Born into poverty, he was a self-taught pianist who earned a living playing in movie houses during the silent era.From 1925 to 1931 Felisberto published four small collections of stories that went largely unnoticed, and whose chief interest is that they manifest themes and techniques that were to mature in his later work. The stories that brought him a measure of recognition appeared in Nadie encendÃa las lámparas (1947; “No One Turned On the Lampsâ€) and La casa inundada (1960; “The Flooded Houseâ€). A feature of his stories is the impassive observation of absurd occurrences by several anonymous characters who are really the same person. The chief preoccupations of this character, often the narrator, are objects, women, and music. Felisberto's masterpiece is the story "Las hortensias" ( "The Daisy Dolls" ). The humdrum, bourgeois protagonist carefully constructs pornographic scenes with dolls, revealing one of the most grotesque pictures of a subconscious in modern literature.
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