I tried reading Rudolfo Anaya's book of short stories The Man Who Could Fly in early October 2012. Several years before I had read Anaya's Bless Me Ultima and enjoyed it very much. The Man Who Could Fly came out more recently in the mid-2000s. I didn't like it as much as his earlier novel. He has some rich descriptions of the landscape and the people and some interesting ideas. But like many short stores, most of them were a bit dark or negative for my taste. I read through the first seven stories ("The Road to Platero," "Children of the Desert," "The Village That the Gods Painted Yellow," "A Story," and "The Silence of the Llano"). I then skipped the next ten and read the last story, "The Man Who Could Fly."
Many of the stories I read took place in the countryside of New Mexico, similar to Bless Me Ultima. The story "The Village That the Gods Painted Yellow" takes place in Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula. The main character, a Mexican named Rosario develops an interest in the ancient Mayans. He works his way south to "Copan, Quirigua, Palenque, Likal, Tulum, Chichen Itza, and today, on the day of Solstice, Uxmal. 'Ooshmal,' the very sound was like a dying breath" (p. 19). Also mentioned is the stela at Quirigua that "computes time four hundred million years into the past, a feat modern mathematicians could only achieve recently with computers and atomic clocks" (p. 19). Rosario isn't like the tourists who came from Merida and liked to tour in the morning when it was cool and spent the afternoons in the cool cantina or by the swimming pool.
I found the first two stories, "The Road to Platero" and "Children of the Desert" fairly dark. "The Village That the Gods Painted Yellow," "The Silence of the Llano," and "The Apple Orchard" aren't as dark but still involved suffering to learn lessons. "A Story" is told by "the writer" and is more Anaya's self-indulgence. I think the only story I liked was the last one, "The Man Who Could Fly" even though it's another "lesson learned " story. I was able to get to the rule of 50 and a bit past it with the stories I read. I don't think I'll go back and read the others.
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