Snapshots: Julio Ramón Ribeyro
Peru’s Julio Ramón Ribeyro is another whose work inspired me. Primarily a short story writer, it was his novel The Chronicle of San Gabriel which introduced me to his work.
The novel is an exploration into Peruvian cultural norms through the eyes of its main character while isolated in a ranch in the Peruvian highlands. There’s a lot going on in this novel that may surprise many who read it. I know it surprised me to learn of the rampant racism and social injustices which had taken place among the different classes of Peruvian society, but Ribeyro manages to present it all with a sense of humor you wouldn’t expect.
His short stories, which are his strength in my opinion, are written with a sense of irony and can often be pessimistic, usually concluding with the narrator or main character having their hopes crushed. Nevertheless, they are entertaining reads and most definitely worth exploring, another Peruvian voice other than the most popular Peruvian writer in the English speaking world, Mario Vargas Llosa. Unfortunately, very little of his work is available in English but what is is definitely worth exploring.
A book of his short stories Marginal Voices (but a bit difficult to track down) and more recently, The Word of the Speechless: Collected Stories was published by the New York Review of Books, are also available, the latter of which is much easier to find and an excellent primer for those interested in exploring his work.