Humiliation: Stories by Paulina Flores

Humiliation: Stories
By Paulina Flores
Translated from Spanish
by Megan McDowell
Catapult, 2019

 “It was tempting to imagine the prosperous life of a protected child,” a man named Nico explains in the story “Last Vacation,” looking back on the defining summer of his life. Worrying over his unstable family—father in jail, drunk mother, troublemaking brother—his respectable aunt and cousins take ten-year-old Nico on their family vacation in the hopes of influencing him. And although he doesn’t view his upbringing with any sort of self-pity, he basks in their discipline and steady attention, their assurances that he’s a “clever boy” who can do better for himself. It’s a story that displays so many of the strengths of Paulina Flores’s debut collection, Humiliation: the careful eye for psychological detail; the mixture of humor and wistfulness; the division of childhood and adulthood, and what’s often lost in the transition.  

 Another standout story is “Talcahuano,” in which four boys devise an elaborate, ninja-inspired training routine to steal church instruments. The narrator feels “strangely proud” of his poor and ugly port town, where the friends build their own universe of schemes and jokes. As his family’s struggles slowly encroach on that universe, the reader is reeled in by the colorful details of the heist, even though it’s clear the background events are more momentous. This complicity makes the narrator’s awakening all the more pensive and intensely sad: “real” life casts the wild joy of childhood as insignificant.

 Born in Chile in 1988, Flores has a penchant for young perspectives. The nine stories in Humiliation, for which she won the Roberto Bolaño Prize, feature child characters whose feelings are intense and mercurial, subtly attuned to the moods of the adults around them. “That’s how suffering was at that age,” notes a narrator looking back on her childhood fear that her mother wouldn’t come home every day, “visible, exaggerated, for innocuous but concrete reasons.”

 There’s a slight flattening out of those feelings in the stories that feature early adulthood. Here, her characters see themselves as world-weary and obscurely superior, even as they’re riddled with anxieties. In “Teresa,” a woman stares at a handsome man, daring him to notice her but thinking all the while, “She wouldn’t invest anything, she’d toss the bottle into the sea without even putting a message inside.” In “Forgetting Freddy,” the demoralized protagonist reflects, “If she was going to be in therapy, it had to be with a therapist who possessed intellectual capacities and analytical abilities superior to her own, and she was sure she wouldn’t find one like that, at least not one she could afford.” The most crystalline example of this is the narrator of “American Spirit,” who recognizes that her past self was “haughty and idealistic” but also “insecure and anodyne.” Her previous co-workers “didn’t seem interesting enough” to socialize with at the time, but it dawns on her that those same sorry co-workers are “now the protagonists of my memories.”

 It’s a dynamic that could quickly become a schtick, but Flores avoids “bright young writer” syndrome, where cleverness overpowers other modes of insight, and protagonists all feel like different shades of the author. That’s partly because factors like family and class are always present, and not abstractly: parents and grandparents flit in and out of these narratives with a sense that they’re going about their separate lives; neighborhoods and homes and jobs (or lack thereof) vary from story to story. But there’s also a sense across the board of young people trying on lives and slipping out of them, with an imperfect understanding that their choices have consequences beyond themselves. “Sacrifices, I told myself, and I went on with my life, a life back then that I thought belonged completely to me.” It’s a sentiment from “Aunt Nana,” one of the most touching stories, in which a woman both defends and regrets her decision to leave home.  

 If there’s anything that hobbles Flores, it’s a slight tendency to overexplain. The title story, “Humiliation,” opens with the perspective of Simona, who at nine years old feels responsible for helping her unemployed father feel happy again. “[A]ll the love she could give him didn’t help,” she notices, “quite the opposite, in fact. In some strange and inexplicable way it seemed to weaken him and make him feel more alone.” But she’s fueled by a sense of possibility as they hunt for jobs. Then, inexplicably, the story switches to the perspective of her father—a brief interlude that only reinforces everything the reader has already guessed. Here and throughout the collection, Flores can trust more to her own powers of implication.

 It may be a quibble, but for a collection that was named one of the ten best books of the year by El País, and that earned comparisons to Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore, there’s optimism in quibbles like this—if these are the heights Flores is already scaling, how much further will she climb?

 —Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer and EFL teacher working in New York.