THE SALAD GIRL - Autor: ESTEBAN BEDOYA - Año 2016

THE SALAD GIRL

LAS ENSALADAS DE LA SEÑORITA GISELLE

Autor: ESTEBAN BEDOYA

Páginas: 86

Idioma: Inglés

Año: 2016

"The Salad Girl" is an elegantly composed and scrupulously structured short story by Esteban Bedoya, a Paraguayan writer currently resident in Canberra, the Australian capital. In due course it will form part of an anthology of "Australian stories" by this Latin American author, whose recent publications convey, with an outsider's keen insight, the idiosyncrasies of a country with which he has become well acquainted and for which he expresses a warm fondness. According to the great Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, there are as many possible readings of a work of fiction as there are readers. One reading of "The Salad Girl" is that of a confessional monologue by an angst-ridden narrator who, lying on a metaphorical couch, recounts a bizarre sexual experience to a reader invited to play the role of therapist. The narrator—or patient—is Carlos Arzamendia, a short, fat, widowed sexagenarian Paraguayan of Guaraní descent. Conscious of his ethnicity, perhaps even embarrassed by it in Anglo-Celtic Australia, Carlos self-deprecatingly refers to himself as an "Indian".