The Word of the Speechless
SynopsisPlot
n a letter to an editor, Ribeyro said about his stories, “in most of [them] those who are deprived of words in life find expression—the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored to them the breath they’ve been denied, and I’ve allowed them to modulate their own longings, outbursts, and distress.” This is a work of deep humanity, imbued with a disorienting lyricism that is Ribeyro’s alone.
Story
About this book
Julio Ramón Ribeyro built his reputation on short stories about people at the edges of Peruvian life: workers, migrants, the poor, and the forgotten, all with little standing in a country reshaping itself through the twentieth century. Writing to an editor, he said his aim was to give speech to those denied it, letting them voice their own longing, anger, and distress rather than being described from outside.
He is counted among the leading short story writers of the period when Latin American literature expanded widely after the Second World War, a generation whose novels often traveled abroad faster than its shorter fiction did. Ribeyro worked mainly in that shorter form, and his books circulated in Spanish for decades before English-language readers had access to a broad selection of them.
This volume, edited and translated by Katherine Silver, was the first gathering of his stories in English. The record describes the writing as deeply human, carried by a lyricism that can disorient. Ribeyro's Peru appears through ordinary situations, where wider social pressure registers inside a single character's day rather than in commentary about the society around them.
