Bolivian author Claudia Peña Claros’s new story collection, The Trees (118 pages; Relegation Books), translated by Robin Myers, blends acute awareness of plant and animal life with a keen perception of the rhythms of the everyday, noting telling details in the smallest occurrences. Peña Claros is also a poet, and this is evident throughout the inventive prose in The Trees. All of the senses are activated in these language-rich narratives that tend to focus on gender, justice, and the natural world:
“We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the worms, the beak of some bird cracking the tender flesh of fruit.”.
The stories echo and juxtapose one another, and we discover how both dogs and people are haunted by invisible forces and by deeds that took place long ago. The collection’s second story, “Ropes,” follows a female stray as she is pursued by a pack of male dogs and returns instinctively to what is familiar to her: an abandoned house, its inhabitants long gone. Seeking safety, she finds “pieces of things that no longer were lay irreconcilable in the grass, sputtered with mud from the rain. On one side of the yard, against a dividing wall, she saw a row of three rooms with low ceilings and shattered windows. They’d been uninhabited for years and there were gashes in the walls, spouting shy weeds and climbers…”
The remains of the brick oven trigger the dog’s memory of the smells that once emanated from it. When cornered, however, her female range is on display:
“Three dogs, freed from battle, had followed the female. The least injured approached, wanting to thrust his body onto her. She tensed and bared her teeth, furious. An unfamiliar strength overtook her, not the strength of heat or pups, and the male withdrew.”
In a later story, the question of when women succumb to men’s advances and when they choose not to is explored, creating a bridge between these seemingly disparate experiences.
The uncanny is characteristic of all the stories. In “Child,” an unknown child clings to and follows the narrator, causing trouble and reflection. In “Things,” the narrator ponders the time and attention needed to care for every “gift” she’s ever received from someone, and forces contemplation of our consumerist society. And in “Forest,” nature causes human displacement and a reconciliation with time. Confronted with a flood, the narrator contemplates the decision to leave the house: “When had it crossed our minds to go in? After all, our place was a different one, a place where we could control things and calculate time. Here, by contrast, time is a ghost whose presence you feel when it moves, cold and invisible, but you can’t use it, or measure it, or name it.”
Like a postcard from the verdant world, The Trees invites us to slow down, to reevaluate the quotidian, and to see from the perspectives of other living things. By not privileging a humanistic point of view, the narratives force us to think more deeply about what it means to be alive.
H. L. Onstad’s fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Harvard Review, Solstice Magazine, and HA Journal, a publication of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.