Juan José Arreola

After reading a few articles on Roberto Bolano yesterday that apparently i didn't read as thoroughly as i though i had last spring, i was trying to follow up on his infrarealism movement. It didn't take me to where i wanted to go (as i have yet to find a complete copy of his early manifesto, "Leave It All Again") but i found something else...

One of the articles, in explaining how Mexico was when Bolano spent time there, mentioned something about Juan Rulfo and his friend Juan Jose Arreola...

The short stories in Varia invención and Confabulario have been compared to the writings of Kafka, Camus, and Jorge Luis Borges because of their thematic similarities. The critical commentary on the second volume was sparse; while they drew praise for their imagination and humor, many commentators did not understand or appreciate Arreola's nonrealistic literary technique. His use of fantasy also again raised the charge that conditions in Mexico demanded a more realistic appraisal of Mexican life and social inequalities. Punta de plata, the collection of allegorical stories based on the physical characteristics of animals at the zoo, was warmly received for its descriptive, lyrical prose.

Juan José Arreola is a new author for me. I ordered Confabulario and Other Inventions yesterday. Oddly, all of his work in English translation seems to be out of print in the U.S. The edition that i bought was printed by the University of Texas back in the '70s.

Magical realism... heh. The more it gets disparaged by critics who say that it's lazy, indulgent writing, the more i find reasons why not to read American literature.