Lyrical, necessary stories that can speak to everyone

The Man Who Could Fly

And Other Stories

Rudolfo Anaya

University of Oklahoma Press: 200 pp., $19.95

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RUDOLFO ANAYA, whose first novel, “Bless Me, Ultima,” is considered a cornerstone of Chicano literature, has been writing and publishing stories for more than 30 years. His new book, “The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories,” is actually a career-spanning selection of his short fiction. Dipping into it, one soon discovers that this is not so much a sampler from a venerated writer as it is a rich treasury of 18 folk tales and myths, many published for the first time.

These cuentos, as they are called in the Southwest where Anaya is from, have a timeless quality about them; in each, as he puts it, the “past seems to infuse the present.”

Whether the stories are set among the mesas of New Mexico or in the pueblos of the old country, most of Anaya’s characters are on some kind of journey, in the literal and metaphoric sense. In this way, he is both honoring and furthering the most fundamental tradition of literature -- the quest for experience born from a longing for self-knowledge.

In “The Village That the Gods Painted Yellow,” Rosario treks through the jungle of the Yucatan in search of ancient secrets. Led by a tour guide who at first seems little more than a hustler, Rosario discovers more than he could have expected and feels “restored with a faith he had never known before.”

In “Jeronimo’s Journey,” a gardener travels from Cuernavaca to his home village on the eve of Mexico’s Day of the Dead to bring his father an artificial leg. Along the way, he becomes increasingly aware of the decay in everything beautiful, of the death that commingles with life.

In “Devil Deer,” the young hunter Cruz shoots a buck inside the fence around the Los Alamos National Laboratory and finds it is terribly deformed. He brings the carcass home, but the old men of his town take it away to burn it. A new legend would grow about the man who “had gone into the forbidden land ... where the forest glowed at night.” Cruz killed something that had become an embodiment of man’s evil, and one does not easily recover from such an encounter.

What Anaya explores in these stories and in his earlier novels may strike some as rather old-fashioned. Some critics have complained that his mythic morality tales and a vision more attuned to universal struggles fail to capture the contemporary issues of Chicano identity. It is true that the effect of these stories is at times abstract and allegorical -- only one is set in a barrio. But his fiction is better understood in the larger context of storytelling as essential for anyone’s spiritual sustenance.

Besides, who writes better than Anaya about the beliefs and customs of rural Latinos, the working men and women whose lives are more starkly defined by the past and its legacies? “The Road to Platero” places us among the vaqueros and their families, responding to superstitions and omens. In “The Silence of the Llano,” one of the most affecting stories in the collection, the desolation of the endless plain (llano) becomes “so heavy and oppressive” that when men would begin to hear “voices in the wind ... they knew it was time to ride to the village, just to listen to the voices of other men.” This story dramatizes quite powerfully the need for stories beyond mere entertainment but as a means for survival. Silence is cruel; it crushes the spirit.

Among Anaya’s many gifts on display in this book is his lyricism, his ability to quietly knit patterns of poetic effect from events. In “Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams,” when an apparition appears on the wall of a church, a young woman named Iliana kneels before it and sees not what everyone else sees -- Jesus -- but “a figure, then two. Arms and legs in an image of love. The figures from her dream.”

Perhaps it is no accident that the stories in this collection that seem too slight or overly contrived are the ones not set in the small communities of Mexico and New Mexico. But overall, this book offers a rich repository of necessary stories -- stories that speak to every community.

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Adam Hill teaches literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.