In this book we find parents and children, servant girls, prostitutes, laborers, foremen and overseers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, landowners and lumber barons, river sailors, scientists, derelicts and drunks, and even union organizers. Some characters are mestizos, or creoles of European stock. Many others are immigrants: from Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and England; France, Spain, and Italy; Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. Like the United States, the River Plate region was a land of opportunity in those days, and the influx of immigrants was very large, especially as compared to the number of native-born. (In 1914 there were about a million Italians—to say nothing of other immigrants—living in Uruguay and Argentina, out of a total population of about nine million.) Though a few of Quiroga’s foreigners ultimately break under the strains of life in their harsh new environment, almost all are hard workers, like most of the creoles and indígenas who live beside them.

Work, indeed, is a central concern in these stories. There are contract laborers (mensualeros or mensús) who slave for months under cruel supervision, only to splurge their advances on a week’s orgy in Posadas and return to the hazards of tropical fever, brutality, and death in the lumber camps. There are peones and household servants who work for short-term wages and are likely to walk off and disappear as quickly and unexpectedly as they first came on the scene. A number of workers are fierce independents who will commit themselves to just one task at a time in order to maintain their freedom from bosses. Others are small entrepreneurs who pluck logs from the river, try to grow crops, or establish cottage industries like cooking charcoal or the distillation of liquor from oranges. And finally, in “The Forerunners,” we have the tragicomic story of the field hands on the yerba plantations and the first frustrated efforts to build their labor union.

Quiroga is no socialist, but his stories clearly reveal his sympathy for the victimized mensús and plantation workers and other peones subjected to the barbarities of cruel bosses. He does not lecture, but simply describes conditions as he finds them. He shows little interest in the class struggle but, as befits a writer of fiction, a great deal of interest in individuals. Their skills impress him, and he admires their strength and persistence in the face of adversity. (Many of his characters are closely modeled on persons he actually knew in Misiones.) His ethic of work may be viewed as a kind of metaphor for human dignity.

Our author’s material is regional and local, and in this sense he is a criollista or nativist. But he is seldom merely picturesque. While his characters and their circumstances are authentic, and he sometimes presents their activities in considerable detail, he is much less concerned with documentation than with basic human problems: survival, taming nature, confronting injustice, raising and protecting children, mastering difficult tasks, rising to creativity—and showing compassion for those who fail and suffer, through weaknesses of their own or the villainy of others. The focus is characteristically Hispanic in that the psychological is far less important than the existential. In some of his urban stories Quiroga displays an interest—inherited at least in part from Poe—in abnormal mental states, but here, in Misiones, his concern is man among men, especially man in conflict—and sometimes in harmony—with nature. (A marginal exception is that of alcoholism, particularly in the case of Dr. Else in “The Orange-Distillers.”)

Quiroga is probably the most important precursor of the so-called “Boom” in Latin American fiction, which coincided, roughly, with the third quarter of the twentieth century. In recent years the names of Borges, Carpentier, Cortázar, Sábato, Bioy Casares, Onetti, Donoso, Fuentes, Rulfo, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Nobel prizewinners Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez, and a number of others, have become internationally familiar, and justifiably so. But they did not emerge from the void; the ground had been prepared, by Quiroga and some of his contemporaries, who were able to shed much of the artificiality, inflated rhetoric, and polemical tendentiousness, as well as many of the normative conventions (largely derived from European literature) of early twentieth-century fiction in Latin America. Their work became less shallow, less programmatic, less extraliterary in purpose. Quiroga in particular began to treat the more deep-seated, more central aspects of human experience—and to do so concretely, in strictly American terms. That he succeeded is shown most obviously by the fact that he is still widely read and appreciated, not only within but also beyond the Spanish-speaking world—indeed that his reputation has grown, his work now receiving increased attention from critics and literary historians.

But as a transitional figure he could hardly have risen to the formal mastery of a Borges, a Cortázar, or a García Márquez. He is not a great prose stylist, though his means, by and large, seem adequate to his purposes. Some of his weaknesses are evident in the melodramatic and somewhat heavy-handed (but nevertheless powerful) “Beasts in Collusion,” which he did not include in any of his books. A number of his stories lack a clear center, sharing two or more prominent themes, such as “The Charcoal-Makers” and “The Exiles.” Others wander from one incident to the next, like “A Workingman.” There are occasional small inconsistencies of detail, imprecisions of syntax, and more often lapses in semantic rigor. But there are just as many stylistic felicities—such as the control of substandard dialect in “The Forerunners”—and the whole is vivid, convincing, and oddly profound. Furthermore, the stories of Misiones present a coherent world-view, a kind of creole tragic sense of life, ranging from pure horror to the anthropological irony of “The Contract Laborers,” “The Log-Fishermen,” “A Workingman,” “The Exiles,” “The Forerunners,” and others. Quiroga remains unique, apparently inimitable.

He wrote about two hundred short stories, and at least a third of them remain memorable. He thoroughly understood the genre, and exploited almost all of its possibilities, including the fantastic, a mode generally restricted to his urban stories, and only tangentially represented here (most clearly in “The Yaciyateré”). For rather complicated reasons, including the decline of Hispanic prestige in Europe after 1588, he is less well known than some of his peers (and freely acknowledged masters), such as Poe, Maupassant, and Chekhov.