Chinese checkers : three fictions / Mario Bellatin

Chinese checkers -- Hero dogs -- My skin luminous

In these stories the narrator speaks rationally, cleanly, carefully, with a sense of precision and progression. But the life he describes is not rational, clean precise or progressive. His focus seems to be on exploring the ins and outs of specific situations. He is not plot-driven, nor do his characterizations seem to function in the normal way -- that is, to create a sympathetic character whom the author leads through some sort of growth process to a sort of epiphany. Any given one of his sentences, isolated from its context, might seem like an ordinary narrative sentence in a traditional work. Bellatin's contexts don't work that way: situations and thought repeat and recur in an apparently random fashion; he refuses to orchestrate climaxes and artificial excitements, even where a conventional writer would immediately do so.