Research Catalog

Title

Underground river and other stories / Inés Arredondo ; translated by Cynthia Steele ; with a foreword by Elena Poniatowska.

Author

Arredondo, Inés.

Publication

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [1996], ©1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Steele, Cynthia.

Description

xxiii, 128 pages; 22 cm.

Summary

• Ines Arredondo (1928-1989) published just three slim volumes of stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, "a necessary writer," is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships.
• Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality.
• Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo's adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in "The Nocturnal Butterflies" and "Shadow in the Shadows" and the dying uncle in "The Shunammite," who is kept alive by incestuous lust.
• Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices - along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church - in the sordid age-old traffic in women.

Series Statement

Latin American women writers

Uniform Title

• Works. Selections. English
• Latin American women writers.

Alternative Title

Works.

Subject

Arredondo, Inés > Translations into English

Contents

Introduction / Cynthia, Steele -- Foreword / Elena Poniatowska -- The Shunammite -- Mariana -- The Sign -- New Year's Eve -- Underground River -- The Silent Words -- Orphanhood -- The Nocturnal Butterflies -- The Brothers -- The Mirrors -- On Love -- Shadow in the Shadows.

ISBN

0803210345 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

95037585

OCLC

ocm32970180

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries