The Curtain of Trees:

Stories

by Alberto Alvaro Rios

University of New Mexico Press, $14.95 paper

The settings in this collection of short stories, small villages straddling the border between Arizona and Mexico, exist in suspended isolation from the passage of time, each place resonating life and color through Alberto Alvaro Rios’ meticulous language and spare sense of the fantastic in the day-to-day. Even so, the transgression of borders between old ways and new are central to the stories. The cortino of trees the title refers to separates not only the generations from each other, but also civilization from the wild, the immoral from the pure, and Mexico from America. The characters are unforgettable: Doña Chuy, slower than most people but faster than most trees; Don Gustavo, who sees the world from the rooftops; Mrs. Cano, the dead squirrel; and the ill-fated Amparo, whose life is altered by cruel intentions and tragic miscommunication. In these stories, through a beautiful mix of magic and sadness, Rios lays bare the brutal love tied up in the complicated bonds of family.

This article appears in October 15 • 1999.

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