The word of the speechless Selected stories of Julio Ramón Ribeyro

The late Peruvian writer's knack for the uncanny is on display in these gripping stories culled from a body of work spanning 40 years. Those written in the early '50s are populated with sinister figures often posed as familiar subjects such as, in the case of "Meeting of Creditors," tax collectors. The stories range from the macabre, as with "Nothing to be Done, Monsieur Baruch," in which a man abruptly slits his own throat, to the mysterious, as with the man in "Doubled" who goes searching for his doppelgänger. Ribeyro (1929--1994) also trades in satire and irony--"A Literary Tea Party" watches a group of bourgeois intelligentsia as they wait around for a famous writer expected to attend their party. As the collection progresses in time, continuing through to the early '90s, the stories become more plotted and less creepy, but retain their theme of focusing on a single male character. "Silvio in El Rosedal" is a complicated story about a bachelor who inherits an estate in the Italian countryside. The later stories go on too long and lack the tight, enthralling storytelling from earlier work, and in general the reader becomes a bit fatigued by the expectation of an inevitable wink at the end of each story. Nevertheless, these pieces dig into the human psyche with sharpness and wit. (Aug.)

Sometimes bleak, sometimes warily humorous stories by Peruvian writer Ribeyro.Ribeyro (1929-1994) is in the second tier of the Latin American Boom, much less well known than his compatriot Mario Vargas Llosa, to say nothing of Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Jorge Luis Borges. The latter's influence can be sensed in some of the stories gathered here, especially the ones in which Ribeyro's protagonists turn out to be ghosts, as the closing of the first story, "Tracks," reveals: "He remembered that the monogram on the handkerchief were his initials, and he no longer had any doubt that inside his room the spectacle of his own death had just taken place." In another story, a fisherman similarly awaits his own murder; in still another, a bankrupt man considers the relief that a plunge down a seaside cliff, "that precise border between the earth and the sea," might bring. Some of Ribeyro's stories, especially the earlier and the shorter ones, are imbued with death, sometimes revealed, sometimes acknowledged at the very beginning of a story ("But hefound little interest in all of these subjects, as he had been dead for three days"). Almost all have a kind of knowing cynicism to them, with ironic distance but not without humor, as with the long story that gave its title to a late collection, "For Smokers Only"; there, the protagonist, a chain smoker like the author himself, admits to a host of health problems"indigestion, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, dizzy spells, and a stomach ulcer"that have beset him while concluding that, well, since Flaubert smoked so much that his mustache was yellow and Gorky and Hemingway were also addicted to tobacco, there may just be good literary reason to keep puffing away. Albeit happy endings are few, Ribeyro's stories often offer unexpected twists, their characters mysteriously disappearing in a flurry of snow or puffs of smoke from cigarettes here and guns there.A welcome selection of prose that introduces a Latin American master to English-language audiences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.