Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories

The Spanish title of this book is Pussy al habla y otros cuentos. I’m always amazed by the art of translation. Edith Grossman is a great and experienced translator of Spanish language books but titles always seems to be a tricky thing for translators and publishers alike. Can you do a literal translation? Or do you go with something that is close and captures the spirit of the book in the new language? Or if the title is untranslatable, do you try something completely different that might approximate the untranslatable phrase? Or do you completely mangle it because you think a literal translation would be offensive? My daughter, who is fluent in Latin American Spanish, believes that conchita might be slang for vagina in some show more countries. Hmmm…that could make sense.

What about Hello, Pussy Talking? That seems to make sense after reading the short story for which the book is named. After all, Conchita is a phone-sex worker. Title aside, this must have been a doozy for Grossman to translate as Conchita’s dialogue with her nutty client must be full of sexual slang words that would not appear in your average translator’s reference dictionary. Roncagliolo does a masterful job of capturing the awkwardness of a phone-sex conversation, especially as the worker tries to understand what it is that the client wants. Then he continues to weave a complex web of inter-related characters including the phone-sex company customer support representative, a mistress, a hit man, and an unfortunate ex-lover with a stalker boyfriend. I finally had to take notes to try to keep it straight and figure out the inter-relationships. You should try to figure it out as well. It’s worth the effort.

Three more stories round out the collection. In Despoiler, we have a loner who believes her body has an expiration date and that celebrating the passage of time showed bad taste. Butterflies Fastened With Pins goes down a list of the protagonist’s friends who have committed suicide. And The Passenger Beside You is dead. All of these stories show imagination, with death in some form or the other being a recurring theme. Usually that death takes the gruesome, sometimes comic form that seems to be a characteristic of South American fiction.

This book was reviewed for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program. show less

Hi, This Is Conchita breathe fresh air to my Early Reviewers experience.

Santiago Roncagliolo's wry and quasi-comic collection of interwoven stories detail the tenuous links between social alienation and the enveloping loneliness that our society's constant hookup, in this case the telephone, instigate.

Although in translation, Roncagliolo's characters come alive, sometimes comically so, so effortlessly in the reader's mind. Indeed, the interlinked characters that inhabit the pages of the novella and each other's existences in oft dramatic, heartbreaking, and always futile ways pull us in so resolutely.

This is a collection of short stories and one longer work that could probably be categorized as a novella. The longer work is the title work and is the best of the four, although all four are good. The work were originally written in Spanish by Stantiago Roncagliolo, who lives in Barcelona, but they have been translated by Edith Grossman.

The title work is told through a series of phone dialogues. There is no narrator. The only thing the reader is given is the dialogue. Each chapter is a different conversation from one of four phone numbers. The conversations seem unrelated at first but they begin to interweave as the story moves forward. Eventually, the author draws the reader into an elaborate, murderous plot.

The other three stories show more also deal with death or at least growing older. Our own mortality and the absurdity of it is a major theme of the entire collection. Each of the other three stories is inventively told and unique compared to the rest of the collection. The first of the three, "Despoiler," is about a woman who loathes growing older and is forced by her coworkers to dress up for Carnival to celebrate her fortieth birthday. "Butterflies with Pins" is a reminiscence of people who have committed suicide. The final story in the collection, "Passenger Beside You," is about what being dead is like.

As morbid as they are, these stories are humorous and absurd. I enjoyed reading them and found them so engrossing that I read the entire collection in a day. In some ways, they could be compared to Vonnegut's works in that they are filled with dark humor that is at times hilarious. However, they are much more modern than Vonnegut and speak as much to our twenty-first century disconnectedness as to our impending doom. This is a very enjoyable, humorous, and macabre read. show less

A novella told completely in telephone conversations and three short, dark stories about carnival, suicide, and death. I thoroughly enjoyed the customer service portion of the dialogue in the novella, especially after realizing that the representative was the character from another dialogue. The interconnectedness of the characters in the dialogue was clever, yet I didn't enjoy the novella much, nor the short stories. The last was the best. The translation was excellent, usually you can tell that the work wasn't originally written in English because of awkward phrases, but this read very smoothly.

Hi, This is Conchita is a book of short stories covering miscommunication and loss. These are brilliantly funny stories of people trying to make connections. Told through phone conversations, the technique emphasizes the distance, the miscommunication and loneliness. We can remake ourselves over the phone, but that breeds its own form of isolation. Nothing is more depressing than a long rambling message on an answering machine to which no one will ever listen.

In the titular first story, a man tries to connect with a phone sex operator, but the fantasy world makes him unhinged. A customer is constantly rebuffed in resolving his account due to bureaucratic circles. A former lover is trying to resolve his feelings through an answering show more machine. A man who wants his mistress murdered, but the hitman falls in love with her.

Much of the conversation demonstrates a strong frustration, you aren't getting what you want, but you can't make that clear. There is too much interference, emphasizing how much trouble there is in simple communication. There is an endearing madness to this story. It reminded me a lot if Senselessness.

In Despoiler a woman his haunted by her own birthday.
In Butterflies Fastened with Pins, we are witness to the suicide if the narrator's friends, with one twist at the end.

The Passenger Beside You is more of an old-fashioned horror story with an epiphany from the dead.

It would be difficult to describe these stories as horror stories, or in some cases even dark. Conchita has a more black comedy vibe to it. Despoiler isn't about her dream, but a loss in her childhood that haunts her. Butterflies has more of the black comedy to it, even the bit in the end. The last story is very touching and moving as well as sad. Altogether these are unique compelling stories that demonstrate a mastery of suspense, horror, and humor.

Favorite parts:
"...people don't listen sometimes, other people's words upset them as if they were, I don't know, fake tickets for an opening, or checks with insufficient funds--you give the check to the cashier and he gives you no money in return." P. 65

"Or maybe it was just the opposite, and he had tried to die for years until one day, by accident, he succeeded." P.160 show less

It's always refreshing to discover a new author who's doing something completely different that what you typically see. It's why I enjoy international literature so much. "Hi, This is Conchita" collects stories throw an absurd lens on the tragedies that make up everyday life,pointing out how mundane they really are, how common loneliness and desperation are among us.

The title story relates a series of phone calls and voice mails between a loosely-connected cast of quirky (to say the least) characters, including a hitman, a phone sex operator, a customer service representative harrassing his ex-girlfriend's voicemail, and a man desperate to end his affair. For each character these particular phone calls highlight their isolation and show more their desperation for interaction or companionship or simply to be acknowledge as a person that exists

This desperation seems to be the theme connecting the book's separate stories. In "The Passenger Beside You" a young woman relates the demeaning story of how she died to another passenger on a city bus. She nonchalant about being dead, but even in the comic telling we can see how her yearning to be seen and legitimized as person is something that's stuck with her into death.

In "Butterflies Fastened with Pins", a young man tells briefly, in a detached and unsentimental tone, almost like encyclopedia entries, the stories of all the people he's known who've taken their own lives. Despite his somewhat cold delivery (including a few awkward jokes), we do get the sense that his friends' deaths have affected him in a not so obvious way.

"Despoiler" is a little different. The main character in this story is a middle-aged woman who has always dreaded social occasions, preferring as a child to be alone with her stuffed animals, and today she faces her birthday. Rather than a yearning for companionship, she seems to want to be left alone. But this story, I think, especially in the context of the others, reveals the overarching idea of the book - that loneliness, and the desire for companionship or recognition are universal, but look very different for everyone.

Comic and punchy, the writing could easily conceal the subtler, more profound insights on the human need for and repulsion from others. But then, the conversations in the title story are far more revealing than the real-life conversations in which we employ humor and politeness to dodge revealing our daily desperation. show less

Hi, This Is Conchita by Santiago Roncagliolo

I highly anticipated reading this book. The author, was previously acclaimed for his novel;, RED APRIL, which had one a distinguished award, Premio Alfaguara in 2006. The translator is the famous Edith Grossman.

The main story is Conchita which what I surmise was a long dialogue driven tale about prostitutes and their clients. What was ultimately problematic was that the various voices were indistinguishable and left the reader wondering who was talking. The characterizations behind the voices were never developed. Through the years I think the only master of a purely dialogue driven tale was the late George V.Higgins.

The other 3 stories of this collection were clearly written by a fresh new show more literary voice and here Roncagliolo manages to engage the reader in the brief dramas: an office celebration, a study of suicides and lastly a murder told by the deceased victim. In these short stories the author’s inventiveness and edgy use of language hold the reader’s attention and interest. show less