South of the Border, a Magical World : A HAMMOCK BENEATH THE MANGOES; Stories From Latin America, <i> Edited by Thomas Colchie (Dutton: $21.95; 416 pp.)</i>

So much of contemporary North American fiction strives toward absolute realism and verisimilitude that to read many of this country’s short stories is to witness our own lives. Not so with these tales from 26 more or less contemporary Latin American writers. Encouraging us, like children, to suspend disbelief and journey into bizarre and appealing lands “far, far away,” they bring on a most welcome kind of dreaminess.

Here is a land where a magician springs to life from nowhere, fully formed, and whose magic is no trick (Murilo Rubiao’s “The Ex-Magician From the Minhota Tavern”); where a philandering bigamist is carried away from certain death by a flock of forgiving birds (Jorge Amado’s “The Miracle of the Birds”); where a man can, by will, metamorphose into an amphibian (“Axolotl” by Julio Cortazar).

That is not to say that the stories are simple or childlike; many tell perfectly horrible truths of injustice and inhumanity. But one reads with the pleasure of a child: Anything might happen. A river of blood might literally flow (“The Plagues” by Moacyr Scliar), or a man might leave his family to float, until his death, in a boat (“The Third Bank of the River” by Joao Guimaraes Rosa). A psychiatrist might commit everyone in his city to his asylum for the insane, thereby fittingly addressing the age-old and absurd question of the possibility of sanity in an insane world.

In “Journey Back to the Source,” by Alejo Carpentier, time literally reverses itself. A house under demolition rebuilds itself, and the sick and dying nobleman who once owned it finds his luck turned around, his illness vanished, his low-burning candles suddenly long tapers, their wicks clean and fresh. His life is recast, rewinding like a movie played backward, until his birth, a time when “he did not know his name,” and then beyond, to a time when “the earth reclaimed everything that was its own . . . (when) woolen blankets were unraveling and turning into the fleece of sheep in distant pastures.”

These stories depend on irony; they depend, at times, on magic or its absence. They demand, mostly, a symbolic interpretation, although, like the finest fairy tales, they hold up under the scrutiny of their plots.

The book is arranged geographically, segmented into five regions (the River Platte area, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and the Caribbean.) The translators vary. While 26 writers are represented, regrettably, perhaps inevitably, only six of them are women. All are, more or less, contemporary writers, many of them still living. The generational peers of North America’s Fitzgerald and Faulkner, Cheever and Updike, these writers present their worlds as invitations from afar. To read their stories is to travel: to foreign countries, to innovative, imaginative styles, and, most gratefully, to a nearly forgotten state of mind as a reader.

The editor seems to feel obliged to pay homage to the idea of magical realism but seems reluctant to classify Latino writers as being solely magical realists. In fact, some of the strongest stories do not take advantage of distortion or exaggeration or fanciful liberties (“Love” by Clarice Lispector, for example, or “The Corset” by Lygia Fagundes Telles, and, most wonderfully, “The Gift” by Rosario Ferre).

However, the overriding impression one has of the anthology is that it would be distinguished from a similar anthology of North American writers by the freedom and playfulness extended toward the written word and toward reality itself. These authors employ fancy and fantasy and magic and spirits in order to tell the truth. Their themes, predominantly, are ones of injustice, of deceiving appearances, of wasted lives, of revenge successfully exacted.

My only complaint is one the editor probably would welcome--he probably had it himself--and that is that I wish I’d had a larger sampling of each writer’s work. Some of the pieces are hardly longer than the more-than-adequate biographical notes that accompany each story. The book leaves one wanting to investigate further, believing, as the editor does, that it is difficult to categorize Latin American writers, but also believing that they are linked, as Jorge Amado says, “by what is negative--misery, oppression, military dictatorship,” and also by what Alejo Carpentier calls “the marvelous in the real.”

This book tantalizingly introduces its English-speaking audience to the abundant wealth that Latin America has to offer.