Today we have yet another Luisa Valenzuela story prompted by the underlying violence in her world. A major theme is the injustice of harming someone out of fear based on how they look. The protagonist is a pubescent girl in an isolated seaside community. She spends a lot of time collecting clams along the beach with her sister. In the process, they fantasize over the imaginary depraved, murderous activities of a seemingly harmless recluse living nearby. The additional conjugations of “to kill” at the end of the story suggest that the girls may have taken matters into their own hands. More…

Two frequent themes in Luisa Valenzuela’s short stories are the daily violence associated with living in 1960/70s Argentina and feminism. Vision out of the Corner of One Eye is one of the latter. A woman traveling on a crowded bus feels herself being groped. When she tries to move away, more people get on the bus and the groping develops into “fondling” and “jiggling”. Rather than make a scene, she decides to give the pervert some of his own medicine. Although this achieves the desired result, she is disappointed she could not be alone with the man. More…

Like many Luisa Valenzuela stories, the main theme of All About Suicide is the unchecked violence of daily life in 1960/70s Argentina. The story is notable for its unusual plot structure. It begins with a description of a shooting, travels back to (supposedly) irrelevant events in the distant past, fast forwards to the immediate past, and then re-describes the shooting. Thanks to the way Valenzuela playfully misleads readers with ambiguous possessive adjectives, the true nature of the shooting remains unclear until the last sentence. The resulting confusion highlights the uncertainty of living in Argentina at the time. More…

Luisa Valenzuela’s The Censors is set in Argentina during the mid-1970’s, a time of political unrest where all communications were screened and censored for anti-government content. The protagonist (Juan) is worried that something he may have innocently written in a letter to a friend could be interpreted the wrong way. He decides to get a job at the censorship office and try to intercept the letter. In an ironic twist, Juan is so good at the job that he is promoted to a top position. Unfortunately, Juan’s effectiveness and dedication to the work leads to his downfall. More…