by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
Rudolfo Anaya is a true storyteller - if he couldn't print his books, I have the feeling he'd wander from town to town telling his stories for free.
In The Man Who Could Fly, Anaya packs 18 stories into less than 200 pages. Some read like old ghost stories and others like adventure yarns, while others drip with torment and gritty physicality. But all come back to one thing: the desert.
Even the stories that take place in Mexican jungles have sand stuck between the pages. When Anaya writes, the silent llano always appears in the spaces between the words. New Mexico, and all that means to the author's identity, passion and struggles, infuses every story.
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I like Anaya's style in this medium. The book is a fast read - the style may be lyrical and slow, but it is elegant in its focus and no words are wasted. The stories are generally simple and clear from beginning to end, and they involve an element of mystery and excitement often lacking from literary fiction.
The most distinctive feature of the book is the feeling that almost every story could be told around a camp fire. Myth, magic and reality intertwine in nearly every story.
On one level the supernatural serves metaphorical purposes, most notably in the dark, brooding "Children of the Desert." But most of the time it's hard to separate Anaya's fictional world into possible and impossible, real and imagined - when a rich man's gold disappears every time he tries to touch it, you just accept it as true. The real world, Anaya shows us, is magical. It's the things in life we can't see that can mean the most.
That being said, the book is far from perfect. I'm not sure if Anaya had 18 stories' worth of interesting characters when he started this collection. All the men start melting into one figure, and all the women into another. There's a hard streak of callous machismo in the men that doesn't get challenged often enough, though men are often portrayed more deeply than female characters.
When Anaya experiments, he usually falls flat. The insertion of himself as a narrator and character in "A Story" is awkward and distracting, as are the self-conscious references to being a writer in "The Village That the Gods Painted Yellow."
In the end, though too flawed to call a great work, this is an engrossing read that is truly entertaining. It brings places and feelings to life in a way few books can.
