Review: 'Sleeping Dragons: Stories' by Magela Baudoin, trans. Wendy Burk & M.J. Fievre
Pub. Date: 8/1/2018
Publisher: Timothy Schaffner; Schaffner Press, Inc.
SLEEPING DRAGONS is the first volume of short fiction by the acclaimed Bolivian author Magela Baudoin to be published in English. In this collection—the winner of 2015 Gabriel García Márquez Spanish-American Short Story Prize—her deceptively innocent portrayals of day to day lives belie the unsettling feeling of things unseen and unsaid and on the verge of falling apart. The young woman in the title story embarks on an eco-adventure to escape a recent break-up and finds herself heading towards an even murkier future; "Mengele in Love" explores the relationship between a chambermaid in a five-star hotel and her sister and the sinister love that came between them; and the specter of the Argentinian "dirty wars" emerges when a writer renting a room in Buenos Aires learns the hidden story of her hostesses.
What I loved most about the stories in Sleeping Dragons is, as I mentioned above, that unsettling unsurety, the uncanny feeling that something isn't right, that everything could wrong in a moment, that violence is looming. And despite this, none of these stories have great shock value. They are deeply human stories, full of the tragedy and joy that is a human life. No story perhaps summarises that better than 'A Buenos Aires Summer Sonata' in which human connection occasionally gets interrupted by cockroaches emerging from every nook and cranny. Light and dark, joy and sadness, it's all a part of a human life. As one of her characters in this story says 'it's inevitable, you have to live with the ugly side of life.' Considering that this story collection willingly looks at that ugly side, it nonetheless also holds a lot of beauty and fascination.
As with most collections, not every story hits home equally. However, I must say that each story in Sleeping Dragons ended up intriguing me in their own specific way. Take the story 'Moeba', in which a female journalist enters a prison looking for a story and finds something very different. Has her life changed now, or are some things inevitable? Can release be found in a prison, or is it just a delay of execution? Do her experiences make her a better person or no? This was one of my favourite stories in the collection. 'The Red Ribbon' features another journalist, recounting a murder-case she has just written about. Narrated by her sister, who has had her own share of troubles and knows her sister deeply, we come to see that even in writing a story you may lose power. There is a cost to her job and Baudoin shows us that cost. Very different in nature are stories like 'Love at First Sight' in which a woman is sucked into the orbit of her girlfriend's chronically disorganised life. Is there still love there? Is it inevitable that they'll move in together, buy a house together, grow old together, or do they have a choice in these matters? Perhaps the most shocking story in the collection is 'Mengele in Love'. Maria works at a beautiful hotel as a cleaner, and her manager has just kissed her. Initially her thoughts on this seem kind of romantic, as if it is a secret love affair. In her thoughts she speaks to Arami, a friend from her younger years, who, like Maria, also fell under the charm of a German doctor. From there, as the title suggests, it gets worse. By the end, the reader has a completely different understanding of Maria, but also of her current situation. I found this a quietly powerful story about trauma and abuse, about lingering trauma specifically that we try to deny. Sleeping Dragons is a collection that holds all kinds of stories, about all kinds of people, all of whom are on the bring of something, a memory, an event, a break-down, a departure.
This was my first introduction to Magela Baudoin's writing and I do also think Sleeping Dragons may be my first foray into Bolivian literature. There is something about Baudoin's writing style which feels very conversational. Even when she covers difficult topics, it almost feels like you're sitting down for a chat with a friend. Not that it feels gossip-y, but there is something intimate and guileless about the prose that belies its complexity. As I said above, despite the heavy topics she describes Baudoin never sets out to shock or scandalise. She wants to create an empathy, perhaps, a connection between these people and her readers, and through her style she is able to create that connection. In his introduction, Alberto Manguel calls it 'tje most apparent frakness', which allows readers to 'sense behind her words a dark retincence, unconfessed motives and secret reasons, people and places whose name Baudoin would rather not remember'. The openness in the prose belies the conflicts and difficultness at the heart of these stories. Each one leaves you with the knowledge that there is much more, that the fight that was averted will happen tomorrow, that the friendship forged now may not last, that the desperate flight for freedom may just end in another gilded cage. This doesn't make Sleeping Dragons sound very cheerful, perhaps, but hopefully it does impress how this collection is important.
I give this collection..
4 Universes!
The stories in Sleeping Dragons each took hold of me in a different way. The candor of the writing belies the complexity of the stories being told, each of which is deeply human in its darkness and light.
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