Intimate Disasters
SynopsisPlot
In this modern age, when the means of communication have turned individual and collective history into a spectacle, literature is the privileged place of subjectivity. This book allows us to peer into the fascinating world of characters trapped in their particular deliriums: a club of fetishists who discuss their particular manias, a man in love with a whale woman, a man whose wife has left him for another woman, and a beautiful secretary who is also a mother feeling asphyxiated by her family. Readers, no matter how they see themselves and what their sexual preferences may be, will experience the same sensation.
Story
About this book
Cristina Peri Rossi, a Uruguayan novelist, poet, and short story writer, is recognized as one of the prominent voices of Latin American literature's post-boom generation. Intimate Disasters is a collection of stories that turns inward, focusing on characters caught in personal fixations and quiet crises rather than grand historical events. Each story centers on people whose inner lives have grown ungovernable in some specific way.
The cast includes a group of fetishists who meet to openly catalog their obsessions, a man drawn to a woman he describes in whale-like terms, a husband adjusting to the fact that his wife has left him for another woman, and a secretary and mother who feels slowly suffocated by the demands of family life. These are not sensational portraits. Peri Rossi treats desire, loneliness, and domestic tension as ordinary forces that shape how people see themselves and others.
The stories share a concern with subjectivity, the idea that private experience resists the flattening effects of mass communication. Peri Rossi writes from a position rooted in Uruguay but addressing patterns of human behavior that cross borders and cultures. The collection was published in English translation, making these stories accessible beyond Spanish-language readers.
