Fury

Who is this?, I thought, and it was me.

“In Silvina Ocampo’s stories there is a peculiarity that I cannot understand, her strange love for a certain innocent or oblique cruelty; I attribute this singularity to interest, the astonished interest that evil inspires in a noble soul.” Jorge Luis Borges

Everything coexists in Silvina Ocampo’s elegiac universe. Lives entangled in fiction, burning betrayals and icy revenges, mirrors or dreams that reflect flesh-and-blood ghosts. The magical everyday of good omens and bad portents, or the unperturbed calm that precedes torrential violence. Much fantasy, much cruelty.

And always childhood, the fine fissure between innocence and perversion. Fúria and Other Stories (1959), her most Ocampo-esque book, brings together thirty-four very brief stories, among which “The Photographs” - a birthday full of joy and the macabre -, “The Patient and the Doctor” - beings imprisoned by madness, illness, devotion and hatred - and “The Sugar House” - spectres of past lives, Julio Cortázar’s favorite short story.