The Impostor by Silvina Ocampo review: meet South America’s queen of the macabre

“There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the state that always seems like the blackest magic to me, like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies, but needs to be fed their suffering as well,” in the words of the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez. “Black magic” is certainly an apposite description of the short stories of her literary forebear, Silvina Ocampo, subject of Enríquez’s 2018 biography, Little Sister.

Ocampo (1903-1993) lived through the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Her extreme fiction was dismissed as excessively cruel by her friend Jorge Luis Borges, and by Argentina’s literary establishment, but has since proved a guiding light for writers of Enríquez’s generation, who are often grouped together under the wider umbrella of “Latin American Gothic”, and are now examining the nightmare of the “Dirty War” in genres such as horror.

Ocampo was born into the Argentine aristocracy and became a member of the literary elite orbiting around Borges, but was in some ways an outsider artist, partly because of her gender. The black satire of her stories, which spares almost no one, springs from this odd insider/outsider status. Almost all of her stories are written from a child’s point of view, a classic horror device that allows her to probe her country’s psyche with an uncanny audacity.

The Impostor and Other Stories, a new collection, spans the late 1930s to the late 1980s. From the title story onwards, the reader is plunged into a freaky universe of derangement, the shattering and burden of memory, houses haunted by previous inhabitants, child abuse and child murder, ritual killing, homicidal and suicidal children, rape, zoophilia and saucer-eyed foreboding.

In a very modern way, and akin to uncompromising recent avant-garde films such as The White Ribbon, The Childhood of a Leader and The Painted Bird, children here are not only victims but perpetrators of evil, depicted with a cackling frivolity. Many of the tales are brutally short and purposefully ambiguous.

In “The Clock House”, a nine-year-old describes, in the style of a what-I-did-on-my-holidays school exercise, a baptism party where he witnesses a kindly watchmaker, a hunchback, become a blackly absurd mock-king sacrifice. In “Thus Were Their Faces”, a group of children from an institution for the deaf, all creepily identical as in The Midwich Cuckoos, fall out of an aircraft, a disaster nevertheless described by their teacher as a “celestial vision”, a “miracle”.

Borges commented on a power of “clairvoyancy” in her writing, a theme she pursues in many of these stories. A fascinating way of looking at these elusive and often baffling tales is to read them as intuitions of something innate in the psyche of a country, something that makes the surfacing of subsequent events – disappearances, baby thefts, people thrown into the sea from planes – seem bizarrely predetermined. (Many of the best stories here are taken from 1959’s The Fury and 1961’s The Guests.)

Another intriguing lens is to see them as parodying the highly abstracted but arguably at times politically blind magical realism for which male writers of her circle, such as Borges and Ocampo’s husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares, were so celebrated. The aura of the self-absorbed male genius is deliciously skewered in “The Music of the Rain”, as is mass delusion in the brilliant “Magush”.

It would be reductive to describe Ocampo’s stories as “premonitions”, but the ones written before the junta’s era of vanished children, stolen babies and doomed aircraft journeys are eerily prescient. As the narrator of “The Impostor” reflects after needlessly injuring a cat: “I thought about how cruel people can be when they are afraid.”

The Impostor and Other Stories by Silvina Ocampo, tr Daniel Balderston is published by Serpent’s Tail at ￡9.99. To order a copy for ￡8.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop