Afternoon of the Dinosaur - Paperback

by Robert S. Rudder (Translator), Gloria Arjona (Translator), Cristina Peri Rossi (Author)

Afternoon of the Dinosaur, by Cristina Peri Rossi, one of the most important Spanish writers of our time, was first published in 1976. Due to censorship in Spain under Franco, it was initially distributed only in Latin America. Then, in 1984, it was published again by Plaza y Janés (Barcelona), and in 2008 it was reissued by Tropo Editores (Zaragoza). This volume is composed of eight lyrical and powerful short stories bound together by themes of alienation and generational conflict in the modern world. According to the author, "the stories are all connected by a sense of persecution and by the solidarity that this sometimes creates between two persons." The first, "From Brother to Sister," deals with the yearnings of love of an adolescent for his sister. In the second, "At the Beach," a young couple encounters a child who both mystifies and troubles them with her extraordinary questions. With "The Influence of Edgar A. Poe on the Poet Raimundo Arias," we find the deep-felt sense of exile of Peri Rossi herself. Two pieces of this collection that carry the title "Simulacrum" give us a science-fiction world of space travel in which human feelings are lost. As the author says, "the final word of the tale is 'mercy, ' (it is a sense of) pity that I feel for myself and for all human beings, because we are condemned to die, to suffer dictatorships, because we are condemned many times to oppression, and we need to seek out, in the midst of this suffering, our fellow men." As for the title story of this collection, "The Afternoon of the Dinosaur," the author confesses that her dreams, at the time of the military dictatorship in Montevideo when people simply disappeared," were often haunted by terrifying dinosaurs. The dinosaur, for her, symbolized fear, danger, the threat of the government. She wanted to tame the dinosaur, to change it into a loving character. It was only after she wrote this story that dinosaurs disappeared from her dreams. Julio Cortázar writes: "Cristina Peri Rossi is not only aware of the hells of this world, she understand the lures of paradise. Her exquisite prose projects her readers into a surrealistic realm that is filled with forbidden yet fascinating choices." In his introduction to the Spanish version of "La tarde del dinosaurio," he says: "In three of the stories from this book the children will lay bare the world of those who claim to control it, and will reduce it to a laughingstock of truth... Brothers and sisters, queens and slaves, false adults incapable of accepting the laws of the game, people that an Aubrey Beardsley or an Egon Schiele would have drawn with the perverse perfection of sterile desire, of a pursuit whose sole incentive is that of not catching the prey, whether it be named Patricia or Alexandra, Igor or Alina. False adults, for the simple reason that adults are false. And the adolescent turns to its past in a last, desperate act of resistance; but its sex and its hair and its voice drag it to the peak that the boy of the dinosaur contemplates in final horror. Now there are no victims or assassins in those rooms of the house; the last of its visitors is able only to utter one useless word: Mercy."

Author Biography

Born in Uruguay in 1941, Cristina Peri Rossi is considered one of the leading Latin American writers in prose and poetry of the post-boom generation (that of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar). Exiled to Spain (due to her political activities against the military dictatorship of Uruguay in the 1970's), she has written more than thirty works that emphasize her concern with all forms of repressive cultural practices limiting individual freedom. Well-known for her defense of civil liberties and freedom of expression, she has long supported gay marriage. Her works have been translated into more than fifteen languages. A major work, Afternoon of the Dinosaur appears for the first time in this new English translation.