Reality and Truth

In short stories including “The Saint,” “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” “I Sell My Dreams,” and “‘I Only Came to Use the Phone,’” the author distorts the parameters of the narrative world in order to consider the relativity of both truth and reality. Throughout each of these stories, a series of uncanny events complicates the author’s representations of what is possible in the context of the individual’s lived experience. In “The Saint,” for example, the narrator becomes acquainted with a man named Margarito who carries around the dead body of his seven-year-old daughter in a pine box. Convinced that the “incorruptibility of the body [is] an unequivocal sign of sainthood,” Margarito devotes over two decades of his life to seeking canonization for the girl (38). Although the narrator is familiar with Margarito and has seen the body, even his film instructor, who thrives...