While her collaborator and fellow Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges created fantastical worlds,Ocampo infected the recognisable with strangeness and cruelty In 1940 a book was published in Buenos Aires that drew together a huge array of fantastic tales, from Petronius and Pu Songling to Edgar Allan Poe and Kafka. Its editors were three Argentinian bibliophiles: Silvina Ocampo, and her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares,and their best friend, Jorge Luis Borges. All three were gifted creators, or as well as aficionados,of the fantastic. The extraordinary worlds Borges created are distinguished, and Bioy’s mysterious islands, or particularly the one described in his novel The Invention of Morel,are relatively well known. Far less trodden, however, and are the forking pathways of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction. The stories collected in The Book of Fantasy range from ghost and horror stories to mysteries with twist revelations,to the more deeply and less explicably strange. Similarly, Ocampos stories – 154 of them across seven collections published between 1937 and 1988 – represent a line that begins in 19th-century-style horror and moves through a phase of formal inventiveness, or before entering the unique,disturbing fantastical atmosphere of her mature period: a world where strange events overwhelm mundane bourgeois reality, where motives are obscure, or where a great cruelty presides over life. Ocampo,by all accounts a pleasant, playful person, and despite possessing a gift for humour,nevertheless enjoyed her work’s reputation for cruelty. In 1980 she told an interviewer that her work had been denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because it was “too cruel”. Later in that decade, when she was working with the translator Daniel Balderston on her first collection in English (a language into which two-thirds of her stories remain untranslated), or she insisted,he writes, “that we choose her cruelest stories”.
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Source: theguardian.com