Published August 1st by Harper Perennial first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions 5. Friend Reviews.
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Eye of the Heart , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. May 07, Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing. He encounters a man he knows from his university days, Luis Greve, who has also arrived at the station much too early through a similar miscalculation. They both decide to head for a bar.
Reflecting on how their respective miscalculation resulted in a chance meeting, the narrator remarks how things fall in series and today will in all likelihood be full of pointless coincidences.
Thus we have the major theme running throughout Bioy Casares' tale. Turns out, our narrator is none other than Adolfo Bioy Casares who relays a story about a pointless coincidence, an odd experience he had some years back. Who knows, Bioy Casares reflects, Greve might help him make literary use of his story. Or, then again, perhaps he has simply fallen into the habit of repeating his own stories. Either way, as many of us know, such is the life of a fiction writer — always telling stories and, like an alchemist seeking to transform base metal into gold, forever on the lookout for ways of turning the raw material of past experience into literary gold.
Both Argentinians were embarrassed but next morning they look down from an upper deck: when a small group of passengers disembark from their ocean liner to board a tugboat they both spot two identical Somerset Maughams.
After listening to this story, Luis Greve admits the double spotting was an utterly pointless coincidence. He then goes on to ask if the story just recounted proves there are moments in life when anything can happen. Carmen also loves Greve and is traveling with him on the sly since she should be back in Buenos Aries attending a fund raiser for the president. In one hotel lobby, she and the president encounter one another.
The president, a formidable woman, is accompanied by a strange little man. The president lifts her forefinger. Carmen thinks the president will point an accusing forefinger at her but instead twice touches forefinger to her own lips.
The president walks on; Carmen turns to Greve and winks, letting him know how she understands the president wants her own trip with the strange little man to remain a secret. From this moment forward, oddly enough, Greve sadly recounts that his love for Carmen and Carmen's love for him faded.
Now that is odd, but I suspect we all can relate to such odd moments in life. Since the flame of love is no longer raging, after returning with Carmen to Buenos Aries, Greve heads off by himself on another trip without even so much as telling Carmen.
On his return to the city, he is greeted by two men who ask him to identify a dead body — the body of Carmen Silveyra. Greve does indeed identify Carmen and is propelled to become a tourist traveling long distances over many continents.
After months of fatigue, he walks down a dingy corridor in a South African airport. Once Carmen detects she has been discovered, rather than speaking, she twice touches forefinger to her own lips and quickly, silently, moves on. The smallest of the smallest was a woman under eighteen inches. She lived high up in a treetop with her spouse and she was pregnant.
And, of course, there is the recent archeological discovery of Homo floresiensis Flores Man on an island in Indonesia, an extinct species standing about three and a half feet tall. Hobbits, anyone? Following the very human compulsion to name and categorize everything in sight, the French explorer names her Little Flower.
But being so small has big dangers: in addition to disease and falling prey to various predators, these tiny pygmies are hunted like monkeys by a tribe of six footers with nets. Once captured, they quickly are cooked up for dinner. Thus, their tiny lives are lived mostly in the treetops where they have very little language, being restricted to gestures and animal noises. Their only artistic expression is dancing to the drum while one of their tribe keeps an eye out for those net casting six footers.
Again, being hunted for food is deep in our human memory — all those years in Africa as prehominid and early hominid provided sustenance for tigers, leopards, panthers and other predators. Back home, a life-size color photo of Little Flower appears in the Sunday paper. The rare thing herself was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet. For me, such love speaks to how, no matter how large or small, we are all at our core embodied, sensitive, aesthetic beings with a heart capable of loving darn near everything, a pretty article of clothing, a certain color of hair or movement of hands or hips.
View all 5 comments. May 07, Michael Miley rated it it was amazing. One of my favorites, to which I return again and again. Includes de Assis The Psychiatrist, which is a wry send-up of the profession, as one by one, everyone in town winds up in the insane asylum.
May 24, Ellen rated it it was amazing. I received this book on my birthday in Absolutely wonderful collection of stories, it took me a long time to read but well worth it. There are 42 stories in all and the reader will find everyone of them impressive. Oct 15, Joe Hunt rated it it was amazing. I love this anthology like crazy! One of the best ever. Latin American writers--all famous. But not just for who's who. Or maybe what you see is not what other people see. A new owner has come to live in a huge mansion at the border of a village, and since his arrival there all the servants try to figure out who he actually is, or rather what he really is like.
Each of them sees their new master from a different point of view and therefore has a different opinion. It causes an endless debate among them and pushes them to go and take a look at him together, to see who is right and who is wrong about his person.
There is nothing there. Why Reeds are Hollow by Gabriela Mistral is my most favorite of all stories that already left deep impression on me. People always dream of equality and ceaselessly, fearlessly fight for it. But at what cost?
And to what extent do we need it? The reeds are throwing certain propaganda for the entire vegetation to have equal height. However, once this is realized, everything is in total chaos: clover as high as cathedrals, bushes grow dozens of feet, flowers get dried, lilies divided in two.
Animals are also badly affected by the so-called equality: get lost, cattle losing their fodder and finally human beings are starving. In short, the effect of equality campaigned by the reeds on the lives of all living creatures is not the good one.
It ruins them, and not the other way around. You might wonder why but the answer is actually very simple: because everything and everyone is unique , they have their own characteristics, duties, functions and benefits. Everything and everyone do not need to be the same in every sense of the word, in every aspect.
It might not be one with the newest or the most shocking premise, but its twisted, unpredictable plot will surely make readers feel tricked. What a perfect timing for unleashing her pent-up desire, and what a perfect person to do it with, too.
Later, after a very long, deep conversasion between the two, Eugene points out that the desire to get into bed with someone who is not your spouse is something normal in an empty marriage, and that any marriage will go through this particular phase, too.
It is such a shame that of the fourteen short stories contained in this rather thin book only four I could consider great and became my favorites.
I cannot say anything but that they are not my kind of stories. I initially had high hopes for it, as it has many famous, great Latin American writers stamped on its front cover. Tempat tersembunyi untuk melakukan kesenangan sekaligus menghilang sebentar dari rutinitas harian.
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