u/workisheat

Not too shabby of a haul I’d say. The most exciting finds are definitely the from the titans like Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, and Mario Vargas Llosa, the ones from Juan Gabriel Vásquez look interesting too. And of course it’s always a pleasure to spot Bolaño in the wild. I have never heard of Daniel Alarcón, but don’t tell me that At Night We Walk in Circles isn’t a kickass title!

Beauty is a Wound had been on my list ever since I saw a redditor recommending it for One Hundred Years of Solitude fans, but I couldn’t believe my luck that I actually ran into it this early. I also got Ekin Kurniawan short story collection Kitchen Curse (forgot to include it in the photo), but apparently Kurniawan has been consistently called the Gabriel García Márquez of Indonesia. And Gabo continues to live up to his legacy as the global face of Latin American Lit. Li Zi Shu’s The Age of Good byes is said to be “rooted in the literary tradition of Chinese-language novels but infused with a García Márquez-like magical realism,“ while Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles is “like an African Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude“. Yan Lianke’s *The Day the Sun Died* is compared to Juan Rulfo‘s Pedro Páramo, and apparently Bolaño once called Javier Marías “by far Spain’s best writer today.”

- Hugs and Cuddles by João Gilberto Noll
- Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán
- Havana Red by Leonardo Padura
- Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists (Granta 113 Winter 2010)
- Natural History by Carlos Fonseca [Suárez]

I was very excited to try this Black Tea Cleansing Oil by Baoweiquan on Yamibuy. Like, smell like dark tea and ~$5? Sign me up!!

My heart dropped the moment I opened the box. Ummmm this doesn’t look like the photos at all. Why is it milky instead of clear like the photos and like the majority of cleansing oils? Okay, I’d to give it a chance. Well….

- Firstly, it smells nothing like tea, at all. If anything, it has a harsh soapy smell, not even in a gentle pleasant fragrance kind of clean, fresh, mildly soapy/linen way but straight up like putting a bar soap and water and let it dissolve.

- Secondly, it feels nothing like cleansing oil or regular oil like that matter. We all know how oils feel like. Even the thinnest, most runny, watery oil feels slippy and emollient when you rub it. This is straight up like water when I touch it, when I rub it. I can’t even tell if it emulsified at all when I add water so I had no idea if any cleansing actually happened!

- Thirdly, it somehow manages to dry the eff out of my skin!! Mind you, my skin can withstand some dang intense cleansing/exfoliating routine. I double cleanse every night even if I was just at home, and my second cleanser is a high-pH paired with cleansing sponge to make sure I scrub my face well. I use Azelaic acid and tazarotene every night. I wash my face with a dedicated cleanser in the morning, sometime even with cleansing oil or alkaline cleanser instead of gentle cleanser. I can throw a clay mask on top of that routine 2-3 times a week and still feel ok. But my skin feels sooo parched after washing this thing off while I didn’t leave it on for 10s max because it has zero cushion to massage!!!!

I’m initiating a return request to Yami now. Wish me luck since Yami return policy is pretty strict :(.

EDIT: I GOT MY REFUND HALLELUJAH!

“The cursed mother of magical realism.” - El Mundo
“The Tolstoy of Mexico.” - Jorge Luis Borges
“One of those writers who come along once in a hundred years…the greatest novelist of the twentieth century.” - Cesar Aira

Such lavish praise naturally beckons readers’ high expectations, which, when unmet, result in immediate suspicion of one's own comprehension rather than automatic skepticism directed at the writer’s reputed capability. Or at least that was my initial reaction while reading the first few stories from The Week of Colors by Elena Garro. My suspicion was further confirmed as I repeatedly had to look for online reviews as soon as I finished each story to aid my understanding, and then, again and again, became bewildered by insights I would never have come up with on my own. Hence my first advice to anyone who’s interested is to be prepared to do your research along the way, and my second would be to save Álvaro Enrigue’s Introduction for last.

This collection can be divided into two distinct categories: the standalones (It’s the Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault, The Cobbler from Guanajuato, What Time Is It?, The Ring, The Tree, Perfecto Luna, Mercury) vs the everyday (mis-) adventures of Eva and Leli (The Week of Colors, The Day We Were Dogs, Before the Trojan War, The Tiztla Theft, The Gnome, Our Lives Are Rivers). Although all of my favorites happen to be standalone, I absolutely adore Leli and Eva characters, which are based on Elena Garro’s childhood with her sister, and thoroughly enjoy the two sisters’ “shenanigans,” if I may say so. These aren’t the kind of stories that could be summarized without inadvertently revealing too much, so I can only say that they depict a very specific kind of morbid childlike wonder slice-of-life that actually somewhat reminds me of me and a female cousin around that age. In my opinion, it’s extremely hard to capture the children’s psyches and make it believable in fictional characters, therefore such an achievement speaks to the writer’s characterization and writing skills greatly, which are only more evident in the standalone stories.

The most famous story in this collection is undoubtedly It’s the Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault. Unfortunately, as of now, there haven’t been that many English academic works nor layperson’s reviews on Elena Garro. Even with that scarcity though, if one is able to find something, chances are it’s about It’s the Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault. My honest confession is I couldn’t quite get the exceptionality of this story despite reading multiple analyses afterwards. Now that I’ve finished The Week of Colors for over a month, I still hold the same conclusion that this is my least favorite story. The good news is it truly only went up from there for me, but maybe it’d stand out more in my next reread. I wouldn’t say The Cobbler from Guanajuato is the strongest story either, but there is something endearing and likable about the characters’ spiritedness and connections against their financially and socially downtrodden conditions. What Time Is It? is where we have the supernatural and horror takes place instead of magical realism. I enjoy this mostly conventional gothic mystery quite a bit, so imagine my surprise when I arrived at the very end of this book and What Time Is It? couldn’t even crack my top three! 

It would first be dethroned by The Ring, a story of obsession and most importantly, what I came for, horrific rural dark magic practices. Yet, The Ring’s most outstanding feature is its narrative method in the form of the heartwrenching police report by a countryside older woman desperately trying to save her daughter. Along with the next twos, The Ring would make my personal pick of three best stories. Generally, I tend to prefer The Ring over Perfecto Luna, a much more straightforward horror story and one of the few proper ghost stories with traditional scares here. But now and then, I have a hard time deciding which one is my second favorite.

There is no doubt which IMO is the absolute bestest though: The Tree. If you already made it to this point, there would be no doubt in your mind that Elena Garro is one fine writer with a keen knack for detailing human behaviors. However, once you read The Tree, you’d see that Borges was onto something when he called Garro “the Tolstoy of Mexico”. Anyone who’s read Tolstoy would be familiar with his uncanny ability to map the characters’ inner monologue and motivations with their external expressions that characterize their personalities while staying consistent with their established backgrounds. Garro effortlessly did just that all within a short story with only two major characters switching back and forth. She didn’t make her villainness commit some great atrocity, in fact, the oppressor was extremely mundane with her unapologetic callousness without any charisma to mask it, yet her streams of thoughts were unnervingly and maybe relatably human even. Nor did Garro make her oppressed particularly likeable and easy to rally behind, some could even find her annoying on a human-to-human level, but the conditions, the treatments she was subjected to were irreparably inhumane to the point that her idea of “liberation” was anything but. I may even go as far to say that there isn’t a single fictional anticolonial confrontation that I’ve read ever come close to this. 

The last standalone story, Mercury, turned out to be a sleeper hit. Theoretically, it should be my bottom ranker: just some nepo baby with his one-night-stand who may and may not exist and most damningly, no ghost, no witchcraft, no horror. However, just like with the main character, Mercury has lived rent free in my mind ever since. Yes, I have been thinking about Mercury way more than my absolute ride-or-die The Tree. In fact, it has been the only story I’ve revisited so far. Why? My answer is simple: the prose. The freaking prose, y’all. I can’t remember the last time I was this bewitched over a love story’s prose. In terms of style and aesthetics alone, Garro’s craftsmanship peaked here. Never had I read a romance of such longing, such passion, such regret with an intensity that luminesce rather than burn. Garro managed to unveil the emptiness of Mexico’s highest society as well as its inherent incompatibility with personal fulfillments with some of the most awe-strikingly luminous imageries, all in a compact short story. Like, Gatsby who? Fitzgerald wished he could write that well. 

In conclusion, read The Week of Colors ASAP. Out of the well-known Latin Boom authors, I’ve only read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I can confidently say that Elena Garro’s artistry is at least on par with Gabo. She herself might have detested the term “magical realism,” but that very specific genre, as well as contemporary LatAm feminist horror and anticolonial speculative fiction, definitely have owe much from her visions.

Before I end this post, let me bless you with the final passage of Mercury:

“En Acapulco no he visto absolutamente nada. Ema me cubre como una espesa capa de tierra, inconmovible a cualquier milagro. Sé que no voy a recuperarla, es el castigo por haber renunciado a la belleza… Nunca más hallaré la preciosa veta… porque ahora sé que ella era Mercurio…”

“In Acapulco, I’ve seen absolutely nothing. Ema covers me like a thick layer of earth, unmovable by any miracle. I know I’m not going to get her back; that’s my punishment for having renounced beauty… I will never again find that precious ore…for I know now that she was Mercury…”