Short stories
Confabulario and Other Inventions
Confabulario
Juan José Arreola · 1952
Synopsis
A collection of short texts: fables, parables, mock advertisements and absurd tales. In a railway station, an old signalman describes to a hurried traveller an extravagant railway network, made of trains without rails and sham stations. Professor Arpad Niklaus seeks patrons to disintegrate a camel and pass it through the eye of a needle. An advertisement extols the Baby H.P., a frame that turns children's restlessness into electricity.
Context
The collection was published in Mexico City in 1952 and the following year earned its author an award from his home state. He later expanded it with new texts, up to a Confabulario total. The Switchman, the best known, owes more to Kafka and Camus than to the social realism then dominant in Mexico. It was translated into English by George D. Schade in 1964 and into French by Claude Couffon in 1993, after a Belgian edition not for sale in 1990.
Who it is for
Texts of a few pages, to be read separately, between fable, parable and satire; available in French and in English.
Prizes and reception
Jalisco Literature Prize in 1953, and the book that made its author known, translated into English as early as 1964.
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