https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/novellanov-a-south-amer... ( )

This a charming and very brief novella (almost a long short story) that explores, well, it's hard to say what it explores. Young Leandro is magically transported into an initially windowless tower after he laughs at an artist (the Devil???) who is displaying some paintings to his mother as they relax in the garden, including one of this very tower. There, in a completely timeless way, he discovers that if he draws or paints objects they spring to life. He creates, initially, a monkey and a bird, but during a game he is playing with them they disappear out of the window he has created. Oh, by the way, at least initially, when he attempts to draw something, something else appears on the paper. The tower seems to belong to the Devil, who at least plays a vivid role in Leandro's imagination. Eventually he creates a boy who is and isn't him, two girls including one who says she is Alice in Wonderland, and a dog named Love. But he is really trying to draw his mother so that she will reappear.

Painting and drawing play a big role in this book, and the introduction helpfully explains that Ocampo was initially a visual artist. She married Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom she wrote the delightful Where There's Love, There's Hate (which I read last year), and was friends with Borges and Calvino. I am happy that NYRB is going to publish a collection of her stories early next year.

This book is completely playful and magical, but at the same time it shows that with persistence, creativity can develop. Although Leandro is a child, and has a childlike interest in playmates and circuses and games and automobiles, he also takes himself seriously. He tells the reader at the very beginning that "I even imitate the way people write. Like some famous writers, I use the first and third persons simultaneously. . . . I'll underline the words I don't understand." And at the end he says "Will the images we've seen throughout our lives remain within our eyes?" In this novella, Ocampo takes Leandro's images and makes them real, for him and for us.

10 year old Leandro is out playing when a strange man, perhaps French, arrives at his family's front door. He is an artist and is selling his paintings, which are of a strange, windowless tower, and of various rooms, including an art studio. The boy begins to make fun of the man and in the conversation that ensues, the boy soon finds himself imprisoned in the windowless tower of the man's paintings. However, with the artist supplies he is able to draw and paint things which come to life, the problem is that the things he paints do not always take the form he wants.

Will the images we've seen throughout our lives remain inside our eyes? Will we be like a modern camera, filled with little rolls of film; of course, rolls that don't require to be developed?

This is an amusing magical realist tale clearly inspired by the surrealists and Alice-in-Wonderland (who makes an appearance in this short novella). Ocampo was an Argentine author, poet and visual artist. She was married to the much younger Bioy Casares, and was also friends with Borges and Calvino. ( )