#616 The Balcony- Felisberto Hernandez
I am utterly taken with the beautiful writing in this collection. Hernandez is just as much a musician as a writer, taking an extraordinary person and building a magical setting around her like a composer builds strings around a piano soloist.
A pianist is invited to visit the home of a father who’s daughter cannot leave her house. She is afraid of going outdoors and has created a world around herself. Her friends are the objects she sees, the colors of parasols she adorns the hallway with, and the balcony she spends most of her time. Her anthropomorphic eye extends to more elusive things like shadows:
“As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they develop souls as they came in touch with people.”
Silence is another theme that gets a lot of attentions here. Like the shadows, silence is seen as something alive with not only personality but emotion:
“I could see it growing on the big black top of the piano. The Silence liked to listen to the music, slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion. But once it felt at home it took part in the music. Then it was like a cat with a long black tail slipping in between the notes, leaving them full of intentions.”
-I was sinking into something like the bowels of silence
-the silence was a heavy animal with a paw raised
These are the types of stories that makes reading more than just entertainment. Enough of the stories that try to relate to everyday life. We see everyday life, exist in it, I don’t want to read about it. I read to escape from everyday life, go somewhere only the author can imaging. I’m glad people still write like this, although that’s not entirely fair…nobody writes quite like this.
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