Piano Stories

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In the library of a university at which I taught for one semester, there was a pleasant, brightly lit browsing lounge furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs. Lined up neatly on the shelves, the newest books with the shiniest covers winked enticingly at students and researchers rushing by on their way to the stacks — and never managed to attract more than one casual lounger or browser.

I was that solitary browser. The New Books Lounge was where I hid out between classes, and where I first read an essay by Italo Calvino in which he praised the fiction of Bruno Schulz and that of the Uraguayan, Felisberto Hernández, in whose stories, wrote Calvino, “The narrator, who is usually a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places. [Hernández] has a few things in common with Hoffmann, but in fact he is like no one else.”

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