Arbol de la vida: Historias de la guerra civil.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

Central American writers, as critic and poet Alberto Baeza Flores has noted, have always had to buck the odds. To the adverse social, cultural, and economic conditions facing them must be added a political climate marked by long periods of tension, conflict, and repression. All the more reason to welcome the publication, in the country that gave rise to them, of these stories about the bloody civil war that devastated El Salvador in the eighties.

During this long decade the world watched in consternation as the social fabric of this land of fourteen volcanoes, which the Pipil Amerindians called Cuzcatlan, unraveled into strands the color of blood, lava, and smoke. Bencastro does not, however, stress the pain of the nation-wide ordeal, although it provides the narratives' somber background. The author chooses to emphasize the tenacity and spirit of the people, while highlighting the myths unique to the region. Bencastro regards literature as the repository of human values and harbors the hope that in the end literature will be what saves the species from total chaos.

The ten stories of the collection reflect the country's social problems. The manner in which social issues are handled is what distinguishes the narratives, which range from the sober realism of "The Photographer of the Dead" to the surrealistic and intensely lyrical "The Garden of Gucumatz." The latter piece, together with "The Insatiable Ones" and "The River Goddess," make use of Mayan mythology to lend a magical and indigenous effect to a social reality. "The Spirit of Things" affirms the strange and marvelous presence of Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero in the streets and minds of the Salvadoran people since his death, while "Tree of Life" succeeds by fantastic means in depicting a people rooted in tradition and happy beyond life's harsh reality.

The more realistic among the stories afford remarkable insights into the effects of the violence on the lives of people who, as shown in the pathetic and moving "Clown's Story," find no use for laughter. But it is the stories that invoke indigenous beliefs that reveal to us the world view governing the author's inventions. The Quiche Maya's profound belief in life-creating oppositions, expressed in the Popol Vuh, lives on in these tales. The sustained allusion to Gucumatz, who appears in one of his incarnations as the serpent Kukulkan in "The...