She has often been compared with Julio Cortázar, famous for his imaginative tales of fantasy, but the road she took as a short story writer was different. While in his fabulous stories Cortázar discovered the unreal in everyday life, Silvina enters real, detailed, intimate spaces, which she observes with an eye that is intimate, real and detailed, and yet an eye from another world. That other, singular, untranslatable world is Silvina Ocampo’s.

Silvina was, besides being a poet and fiction writer, an artist who studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger—and she shared with Bioy a passion for photography, though she herself did not like to be photographed.

In the stories of her first published book Forgotten Journey (1937), as in the rest of her fiction, one notes a trace of the gothic novel, an affinity for fantastical tales, her De Chirico training (“There is more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day than in all the religions of the world” wrote De Chirico), as well as the photographic instinct to escape time by capturing it, and the vertigo of cinema.

But there is another Silvina Ocampo who molds all of these ingredients: a cruelty unconscious of itself, with no self-restraint, uncontrollable, and without the slightest remorse. About this side of her Borges wrote: “There is an aspect that I have yet to understand, a strange love for a kind of innocent or oblique cruelty.” That “yet to understand” Borges speaks of is part of the charm of Silvina Ocampo’s stories: there is always something unresolved, the inevitability of a plot or scheme transcending the narrative itself, announcing an unexpected vision. What escapes our grasp is what is actually being represented, and what gives the author’s stories their power.

But the aspect Borges focuses on, this “yet to understand” is, however, quite understandable, and not only from a woman reader’s point of view. What Silvina feels and expresses in her stories is the need to be cruel in order to pull an inner trigger, as Blas Matamoros explains: “The children of the upper class bourgeoisie do not have any fundamental motivation to oppose their social order, thus their familiar situation on the sidelines as it were, engenders a partial opposition to a fundamental institution of that order, that is, the family. Rather than taking on Revolution, the enfants terribles take on Evil.”

In an interview with novelist Mempo Giardinelli, Silvina Ocampo said: “I wrote all my life. Ever since I was very little. And I wrote so much that the teachers I had, when I’d show them what I had written, would tell me: ‘Come on, don’t write so much, you’re wasting all the paper in the house.’ It’s a ‘lack of economy,’ they said.”

But it’s not to contest a “lack of economy” that these stories are brief. We actually have before us long, complex stories that make no effort to be efficient or concise: each one of them indulges excess, filled with subterranean literary implications. They gain impact by not seeking efficiency. They are tremendously powerful because they delight in excess unpretentiously, with a fresh air of spontaneity. The short story for Silvina is a “natural” genre, as she remarked in the same interview: “I don’t like when I write expansively. Because when I do so, when my writing is lengthy it is too effusive and seems superfluous. ‘Look,’ I say to myself, ‘I think this is too much. . . .’”