Twenty-one stories form The Furniture of the World, written across 1999 to 2022. Some appeared in The Blue Horses (Trea, 2005) or Gritar (Lengua de Trapo, 2007), while another ten were unpublished until now. The collection weaves these pieces together, some of which were previously unseen or not yet gathered in volume.
In a preliminary note accompanying the collection, the author describes the project with a vivid image: a narrator by the fire. This voice aims to carry a flame of hope and consolation. It speaks of stories as embers kept alive, efforts to prevent the night from swallowing meaning, and attempts to preserve something irreparable. Although the forms vary—from short fiction to longer novels—the work consistently treats the world as a shadowed space with no clear exit. Literature, art, and above all beauty are imagined as forces that soothe the ache of existence. In other words, the stories share themes common with the author’s novels, such as Crime, Children in Time, Light Is Older Than Love, The System, and Homo Lubitz. Yet the note suggests that the ideal form for these moral sensibilities, given the stated aims, is the novel rather than the short story, making it clear that the approach to a persistent crisis favors expansive narrative over compact form.
Still, the twenty-one pieces in this collection trace a shared line. They unveil both the architecture of evil and terror and the shock of the ineffable and beauty’s longing. The settings and characters vary greatly: from a civil servant to a countess, from an ordinary house to archives of old manuscripts, from the studio of a sixteenth-century painter to the death trains of a bygone war, and from jazz clubs in Chicago to the streets of Montevideo. The prose maintains a remarkable breadth and a controlled richness, even when it embraces near caricature registers—think of a spare, paranoid voice echoing a fan of a notorious character, or a comic duet remixing contemporary political figures with fantastical puppetry.
The stories tend to foreground culture and the lives of painters, philosophers, writers, photographers, and musicians. They explore how these figures move within social unrest, the contested meaning of art, and the vast absurdity of the world. If these cultural references echo famous artists or imagined biographers, they are kept in service to broader questions. The collection looks at lives that never quite make it, the ache of not achieving literary success, and the intimate, almost sacramental tension between beauty and a looming malice. Ultimately, the author presents a vision in which knowledge and art mingle in the lives of celebrated names and overlooked talents alike. The narrative stance remains rooted in a longing for transcendence, even when that pursuit meets a hard, earthly edge. A guiding note reiterates that every story begins from a gaze cast into darkness yet paired with privilege.
Darkness, it seems, is a universal condition. The author’s talent transfers to many characters, including a painter labeled Joyce and a Nobel candidate named Mingus, with even the narrator’s traits echoing through the cast. The sense of place and history travels through journeys and personal obsessions, threading through the geography of the book as it explores the pull between shadow and light.
Identity emerges as a central thread. The opening piece, Blue Horses, frames the classic tension through the double life of a troubled man. The question of what is real surfaces again in the way destinies overlap and in the playful yet perplexing leaps through time that blur days, faces, and loves. Passages hint that life itself is mutable: lines such as there is a world within the world and a name being merely a name invite constant renegotiation of who one is. The longing for companionship, even with a past partner, becomes a powerful motive, a search for a like-minded soul beyond words. Love and the world’s oscillations—rising and falling—shape the emotional arc that courses through the collection, with persistent, almost relentless noise shaping the narrative voice.
When art enters the stage, distortions, mysteries, and palimpsests rise to the surface. The passion at the core of any true artist pushes toward the impossible and the ineffable, even as that drive can skew toward illness or obsession. The collection culminates in three stories that confront fire, that wild animal darkness, and the confusions of life in a bold, daring fashion. These pieces, as grand as they are unhinged, echo the overarching meditation that appears in the opening epigraph about the furniture of the world, a quotation reflecting on the limits and ambitions of artistic creation. The final tale, Beauty and the Beasts, places the elegant distance of Catherine Deneuve against the stark, unsettling presence of the hospital and the wandering figures of El Greco, turning beauty toward mortality and casting a cold, luminous light on art’s fragile spark.