Tratado de la Infidelidad ("Treatise on Infidelity") (2010)
Julián Herbert and León Plascencia Ñol (1971, 1968)
119 pages
Julián Herbert and León Plascencia Ñol explore some of the more unusual corners of human relationships in their collection of short stories Tratado de la Infidelidad (Treatise on Infidelity). No simple story arcs here of boy meets girl, and after a bit of conflict they fall in love.In the opening story, a man travels to Lisbon to renew his relationship with a married woman, trysts that carried on through the end of her first marriage and that they are now resuming during her second. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, however, and when their rekindled passion leads him to stray from the strict rules he has set for himself in such relationships, troubles soon follow.
In Gymnopedias, a thirty-year-old man in Mexico who’s never had a girlfriend is approached in a bar by a sixteen-year-old girl who had been part of a German volleyball team traveling across Mexico playing matches. She abandoned her team when the time came to return home, and has been wandering across Mexico, picking up guys who will support her.
Several of the stories in the second half of the collection feature a loosely interconnected set of characters and range from a truly bizarre exchange about cats to a story in diary format, in which a man who works as a photographer records his profoundly unbounded relationship with a dancer. She seems to have no inhibitions, and has become at once his lover and at the same time a kind of muse for his photography. It could be said that unbounded is perhaps not the most appropriate description for some of their myriad activities…
I read this book in Spanish, and admittedly struggled with a lot of the slang. As in most any language, there are, not surprisingly, a wide variety of words for various body parts that figure prominently in sexual relationships. I’m not aware of an English translation of the book, but a reasonable level of Spanish, and a willingness to dig around on the internet for the meanings of the slang used, will allow a reader to enjoy it. In return, these stories offer up a piquant look into various corners of the broad range of modern relationships.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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