cover image Dangerous Virtues

Dangerous Virtues

Ana Maria Moix. University of Nebraska Press, $50 (153pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-3189-4

""Once Upon a Time's blond curls grew back, One Left to Tell It mentally wrote under the linden trees as he looked at the white form of his sister, standing with her back to him on the other side of the lake."" So begins ""Once Upon a Time,"" a characteristic sample of the witty, delicately mannered make-believe of acclaimed Spanish poet Moix. In her fictions, strange things happen constantly: parts of a fairy tale imagine themselves and reflect on their plights; a count is born dead forever, and his wife is always a widow. These stories are not, however, merely cold jeux d'esprit: Moix sympathizes with her fantastical creations and only gently twists our emotional interest in them toward reflection. In the passionately platonic title story, a general dies of jealousy because he is excluded from his wife's quest for immortality in the gaze of another woman. In another, after a betrayed lover beats up the drunk who tries to console him with ""kind-hearted stories,"" the drunk calls out, tapping his forehead: ""No, no, they are not stories... because everything, everything that's true happens here, here."" Moix's latter-day Symbolist fables manage--like a tale of Poe or a poem of Valery--to send blood coursing through the extremities of imagination, where fiction touches on reality and the teller crafts and is crafted by her tale. (Aug.)