Short stories
Los gallinazos sin plumas
Not translated into English
Julio Ramón Ribeyro · 1955
Synopsis
Eight stories about the city. In the title story, every day before dawn, don Santos, a lame old man, sends his grandsons Efraín and Enrique to gather, from the rubbish dumps of Lima, enough to feed his pig, Pascual, better cared for than they are. Efraín cuts himself on glass and falls ill, Enrique takes in a stray dog, and the grandfather's anger rises as the children grow weaker. The other stories follow Limeños whom life has left on the margins.
Context
The collection appeared in Lima in 1955, when the author, who had arrived in Europe in 1952 as a scholarship student, was living there on odd jobs. It deals with the city and accompanies, with other books of the generation of 1950, the shift of Peruvian narrative from the indigenista sierra to Lima, at the moment when Andean migration was giving rise to belts of poverty around the capital. The author later included these pages in the collected edition of his stories, published and expanded from 1974.
Who it is for
Short stories in Spanish, written in a sober style in which nothing is underlined; each can be read on its own.
Prizes and reception
The first collection by an author regarded as one of the best Spanish-American storytellers of the twentieth century.