Book Reviews


Ana Lydia Vega.
Pasi6n de historic.
Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Flora, 1987.



 Ana Lydia Vega's third collection of short stories
entitled Pasi6n de historic (story-bound) includes six
stories as different from each other as their titles.
They are tied together by Vega's masterful use of street
language, literary and historical parody, play of words,
allusions to soap operas, T. V. programs, hit songs, and
a suspense ingredient that could lead to some bloody
outcome. Vega's previous books (Virgenes y mArtires,
1981 and Encancaranublado, 1983) dealt with short
familiar episodes in a common life setting. Her
characters and stories were drawn from all social groups
in Puerto Rico and their Caribbean counterparts in Haitt,
Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In Pasi6n de historic
Vega has included one more element: the way people's
thinking is changed by their reading of sensationalist
and gory news in El Vocero, the daily newspaper with the
widest circulation in Puerto Rico. How do people see
their own lives when every morning they read that
someone has been strangled, or chopped to pieces, or
burned alive, or shot twenty times because of passionate
love ?

 The first story which gives the title to the entire
collection was awarded the prestigious Juan Rulfo Inter-
national Prize. It is a long story which encloses three
simultaneous plots: the narrator is writing a story
based on a true murder; her friend Vilma is telling the
narrator her own intimate story about wife beating,
repression and enslavement; the narrator is also going
through her own emotional crisis since she just broke
up with her "compaiero." All the stories are unfinished
and the reader is free to complete the missing pieces.
The language is so vibrant and rich in meaning that the