Southpaw: Short Stories (Paperback)

At 16 this London-born writer married a Venezuelan aristocrat 20 years her senior and went to live on a remote sugar plantation in the Andes, where she was more or less abandoned by her mentally unstable husband. After seven years she left with her young daughter and later married a Scottish painter, choosing to settle in rural Umbria. Small, backward, out-of-the-way places fascinate her for the characters they create. While her acclaimed memoirs 'The Hacienda' and 'A Valley in Italy' recount her own experiences, 'Southpaw' draws on the stories of the people she got to know in South America and Italy, people who accepted her into their tight-knit communities, though she always remained, in her own words, 'an alien observer'. Written over a period of 25 years, her stories mark a shift from the villagers' poverty to relative ease, though the older ones never quite believe in it.

All but two of the stories are fictional accounts based on real characters: 'Dom Leopoldo' is inspired by the Latin American classic 'Pedro Paramo' and has parallels with the Brazilian film 'Central Station'. A boy goes in search of his father on the death of his mother (at 35, though her son guesses her age as 60.) He knows only the name of her village but deduces that the notorious station master Dom Leopoldo is his father. Hoping for an inheritance, he finds instead a disused railway station and a village full of ghosts where he glimpses of the suffering of his raped mother and remorseful father. Antonio Mezzanotte is the true story of a boy blown up by a landmine while looking for truffles after a village banquet. He loses an arm, is blinded and scarred. He spends the rest of his life wandering around the village storing gossip, purely for himself: 'patching together all that life meant to him, glueing himself back into shape with the human mortar of news'.

The other stories weave between the otherworldly and the factual, all brilliantly capturing the suffering and survival of poor, ill-educated people up against the odds. In 'The bolshybally' a child who looks like a toad finds work in a brothel and befriends the crippled Madame who dreams of the Bolshoi. 'Eladio and the boy' tells how a brain-damaged father and his mute son spend day after day out in the hills watching for the return of an eagle. In 'Silvio and the washing lines' an old man gazes upon pages of his poems depicting a lifetime of events in his village pegged on the line to dry, but ruined by a flood in a cellar.

Lisa St Aubin de Teran's stories never fall into pathos. They flirt with despair but come out the other side, buoyed up by the spirit, humour and pride of her characters. While their environment is their enemy, it is also their strength. A jubilant sense of place pervades the stories, together with the smell of woodsmoke, acacia blossom and the day's baking.