It moves at a more leisurely pace than the typical Quiroga tale, with spun-out plot, lingering over realistic details. The characters in this ophidian world are more compelling than believable, and the animal characterization is not perhaps as striking as that of some shorter narratives like “Sunstroke.” But Quiroga, the fluent inventor at work, can almost always make something interesting happen. “Anaconda” lies on the ill-defined frontier between the long story and the novella and will gainsay those who think Quiroga sacrifices everything to rapid narrative. Consequently, it loses something of the dramatic intensity of other stories, despite its original title of “A Drama in the Jungle: The Vipers’ Empire.” The tight-knit, tense structure we can perceive in “Drifting,” “The Dead Man,” and many other Quiroga stories is considerably slackened here. On the other hand, Quiroga compensates for this by offering us a story of exuberant imagination, rich in irony, with abundant satirical implications about man and his behavior. Like the Jungle Tales, “Anaconda” will have a special appeal for children, but, unlike the former, it is essentially directed to a mature audience.

If we examine Quiroga’s stories attentively, we will find moments full of vision concerning mankind, often illuminating a whole character or situation in a flash. Quiroga has an astute awareness of the problems besetting man on every side, not only the pitfalls of savage Nature but also those pertaining to human relationships. Man is moved by greed and overweening ambition, hampered by fate, and often bound by circumstances beyond his control. Quiroga penetrates the frontiers of profound dissatisfaction and despair felt by man. His vision is clear and ruthless, and his comments on human illusions can be withering. Yet it is man’s diversity that emerges in these stories, his abjectness and his heroism. Though Quiroga never palliates man’s faults and weaknesses, the heroic virtues of courage, generosity, and compassion stand out in many of his stories.

All this rich and multifarious human material is shaped and patterned into story form by a master craftsman. Quiroga was very conscious of the problems involved in the technique and art of the short story, and, like Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre, he wrote about them. His most famous document on technique is what he dubbed a “Manual of the Perfect Short Story Writer,” a succinct decalogue filled with cogent and compelling advice. The usual warnings stressing economy of expression are here: for instance, “Don’t use unnecessary adjectives”; and also those concerned with careful advance planning: “Don’t start to write without knowing from the first word where you are going. In a story that comes off well, the first three lines are as important as the last three.” It is easy to find apt examples of the latter dictum in Quiroga’s work: “Drifting,” “The Dead Man,” “The Decapitated Chicken,” “The Feather Pillow,” and so on, to cite only from the stories translated in this collection.

The last commandment in Quiroga’s decalogue to the person desiring to write perfect short stories is probably the most suggestive: “Don’t think about your friends when you write or the impression your story will make. Tell the tale as if the story’s only interest lay in the small surroundings of your characters, of which you might have been one. In no other way is life achieved in the short story.” Quite rightly Quiroga emphasizes the word life, for it is this elusive and vital quality which lies at the core of his stories. The idea that the author or his narrator might be one of the characters is also significant, for he often was one of the characters, at least in some aspect, or felt that he was one of them.

Certainly in his best stories Quiroga practiced the economy he talks about in his manual and which is characteristic of good short-story writers. Almost every page will bear testimony to this laconic quality. It is a brevity which excludes everything redundant but nothing which is really significant. Wonderful feats of condensation are common, as in “The Dead Man,” where he shows his powers in dramatic focus on a single scene, or in “Drifting,” a stark story in which everything seems reduced to the essential, the indispensable. The brief opening scene of “Drifting,” where a man is bitten by a venomous snake, contains the germs of all that comes afterward. The language is terse and pointed, the situation of tremendous intensity, the action straightforward and lineal. Everything moves in an unbroken line from beginning to end, like an arrow to its target, to use Quiroga’s phrase referring to technique in the short story. The title, too, is particularly appropriate: while the dying protagonist literally drifts in his canoe downriver seeking aid, we see him helplessly adrift on the river of life, unable to control his fatal destiny from the moment the snake sinks its fangs into his foot.

In “Drifting,” “The Son,” “The Dead Man,” and other stories, Quiroga plays on a life/death vibration, juxtaposing the two. While the throes of death slowly diminish the protagonist of “The Dead Man,” Nature and the landscape surrounding him pulsate with life—the ordinary domestic quality of daily life he is so accustomed to—so that he cannot accept the fact of his dying. Our curiosity is kept unfalteringly alive by Quiroga’s dramatic technique. At his finest moments Quiroga reaches and maintains a high degree of emotional intensity, as in the three stories cited above, which have in common their magnificent treatment of death. Quiroga flinches from none of the difficulties perhaps implicit in this theme.