People on the Prowl
By Jaime CollyerTranslated by Lillian Lorca de Tagle
ISBN: 0-935480-73-0
Price: $14.00
Pages: 144
Jaime Collyer, hailed as the "new Borges," boldly recasts the traditional Latin American story in People on the Prowl. One of the leaders of the new Chilean narrative, Collyer is the author of four novels and this collection of short stories, now in its fourth edition in Spanish.
An author of international acclaim, Collyer has been awarded the Gabriela Mistral award (Chile 1979), the Premio de Novela Corta Ciudad de Villena (Spain 1985) and the Premio Jauja (Spain 1985), as well as being a finalist for his work Gente al acecho (People on the Prowl) in the Casa de las Américas contest (Cuba 1984)--one of literature's most coveted prizes. Collyer was recently invited to attend the prestigious Harbourfront International Reading Series in Toronto, Canada. Authors who have attended in the past include: William Golding, A.S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Drabble, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and many more.
"The Chilean author Jaime Collyer was trained as a
psychologist, but judging by People on the Prowl...
he is a born storyteller. The briefest entry in this elegant
and engaging collection of short fiction is less than a page
long but in no way slight, either in style or content....
Mr. Collyer writes stories that are centered on the striking
incident, the odd turn of events of the perennial
peculiarities of human nature.... As translated by Lillian
Lorca de Tagle, Mr. Collyer's style is eminently clear and
dry.... Mr. Collyer is keenly aware of the absurdity that
can infect the politics of rebellion, and his sense ofirony
is just as keen.... His supremely civilized intelligence,
given to teasing the imagination, is predominantly on
display, but a more emotional side occasionally surfaces.
And in 'Round Trip Ticket,' when the narrator explains why
he cannot face a final encounter with a woman he once loved,
Mr. Collyer reveals that he is just as deft at probing the
heart."
--New York Times Book Review
"In Collyer's work, no traditional Western institution successfully explains or makes safe the universe. Church, state and commerce, the academic and the psychoanalytic couch: They all fail beneath the onslaught of a primitive unconscious that physically, psychically or literally devours them. People on the Prowl is the revenge or triumph of the primitive. Sometimes the winning side seems just--especially when compared to the junta-ruled continent the author comes from--and other times it is simply deeper, more potent...
In a wild melange of intellectual delight and horrific pessimism, Collyer echoes...the Argentine progenitor of all meta-fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, and, more explicitly, Borges's fellow Argentinian, Julio Cortazar....
People on the Prowl finds that the one true virtue of
civilization lies in our ability to write about how
uncivilized we really are. Only the imagination, maybe,
holds a chance of counterbalancing the violent, fecund and
sexual force geysering up from below. This collection
embodies that power."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"The 15 stories are from a world of Collyer's
imaginative creation, without limits of time or space. We
travel from the Danube to the Amazon and from the French
Revolution to a modern symposium on ethnology--without being
surprised at doing so. Collyer's political and social satire
humorously attack Freud, religion, death, cannibals, and
chess."
--Library Journal