BOOK REVIEW
Cuentos completos by Hebe Uhart
by Ricardo Montiel
Translated by Michael Redzich
Cuentos completos. Hebe Uhart. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora. 2019. 784 pages.
In the short story “Desfulanizar,” the narrator remembers one of her father’s rules: to greet the townspeople so they didn’t think she was prideful. But the narrator didn’t care what other people thought. She also didn’t care that her father told her about how once, when he was a child and didn’t say hello to someone, he knew he’d done wrong and deserved to be punished. To his daughter, this story, which she considered from a different time, went against her effort to “make people more real, to understand them in their own way, not tied to that deadly routine.” And there it is—the kernel of this piece of writing by Hebe Uhart(Moreno, Buenos Aires Province, 1936 – Buenos Aires, 2018). It is revealed over the course of Cuentos completos [Complete Stories], published by Adriana Hidalgo Editora. “Desfulanizar” means to cleanse the subject of preconceived notions, from the mark of social stereotypes, and to get back to finding their blurred individuality, to observing, and above all, tirelessly listening. This must be done without the pretense of changing them; rather, it is a matter of recognizing their dormant complexity over the noise of “should be.”
