Readings

No Man’s Land: Selected Stories

City Lights, 144 pp., $13.95 (paper)

In the opening story of Mexican writer Eduardo Antonio Parra’s second collection of short stories, Soto, a tabloid journalist, is forced to confront the double homicide of his most valued photographic subjects: two nymphomaniac hobos.

“Think, Soto, he said to himself, trying to concentrate, it’s just another crime in the city, same as the ones you report on every day to feed your readers’ morbid curiosity.” But it’s not. Then a flashback: Soto, after unsuccessfully looking for the two for a photo shoot, hears “an old woman’s cracked, sleepy voice: ‘Look for them in the block back thataway.’ She smiled roguishly. ‘They went over there to screw.'” Soto resumes his search for the “[c]oconspirators against the universe” and, finding them, attempts to photograph “the magical aura surrounding the bums.” This turns them on, and they begin to passionately screw, at which point Soto excuses himself.

We then return to the present to learn the gruesome details of the murders. “They’d found him raping the dead man,” we are told. When questioned as to his motives, the murderer responds, “Like, just because. … They were assholes, they wouldn’t share their juice.” And Soto’s reaction? “Soto felt like puking.” Indeed.

The 10 stories comprising No Man’s Land, all of which are set in Mexico’s northern borderland, are inhabited by transsexual prostitutes, petty clerks, dusty pickups, broken bottles, sadistic police officers, and wind-blasted prairie. Behind each story seems to play a sinister rendition of the adage “When you ain’t got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.” Hope, when it appears, comes in two forms: romantic love, and the Promised Land specter in the distance, America.

Much of the writing (or translating?) here is shockingly bad. Sides split with laughter and damning words hang in thick air. There is “the whistling of the wind” and there is “the sun’s wrath.” And the writing most noticeably fails in the dialogue, especially the attempts at slang. “And why’d you ice him?” “Because of a chick.”

Given this, it’s no wonder that there is a dimension missing from Parra’s writing. Some of the characters exist entirely without hope, and so are beyond the potential for any meaningful, substantive conflict. Others are little more than lustful animals capable of moments of self-reflective irony.

And yet there are other characters – a select few – who reveal a more subtle psychological study, imbuing several of the stories with a quietly haunting quality. If these were short films instead of short stories, one would be justified in suspecting that the original stories contained real power, but that they had been marred, dumbed down, by a sloppy screenwriter, inept director, and clueless cast. Unfortunately, though, these are the stories themselves, and there is nothing else to trace the original vision back to.

This article appears in September 17 • 2004.