In the middle of “Collateral Beauty,” the fifth of the six stories included in María Ospina’s Variations on the Body, a woman named Estefanía receives a book from a man with whom she’s been corresponding, whom she wishes to meet but is unable to find. But the book isn’t actually a book. Maybe it once was, but the pages have been removed, and it has been transformed into a display box for a severed doll’s head:

There, in the hollow carved out of the pages, the head of an antique doll rested on a bed of dried flowers, protected under glass. A dark-skinned face nested in a fragile book, surrounded by unfamiliar and unintelligible letters.

Because of the gentleness of the story, this visual is less macabre and more beautiful than it might seem here, as an example taken out of context. As soon as she sees the doll, Estefanía recognizes it and remembers its entire poignant history. This scene offers readers a clear picture of all that this slender volume contains: nested stories, body parts, tenderness, relationships involving two or more people unable to find one another, and a playful approach to the notion of display. Combining these elements, Ospina suggests ways in which distance and intimacy are inextricably entwined.

We see this immediately in the collection’s first story, “Policarpa,” in which Marcela, a former guerrilla fighter for the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) is now working at a monstrous superstore. She brings home various beauty products, each targeting a different part of her body, in order to try them out. But this is only one of Marcela’s stories. In addition to her cashier job, Marcela also spends time with an editor who wants to publish the narrative of her escape from the jungle; but the more the editor works with Marcela, the more Marcela’s words are excised from the text, putting her at a greater distance from a story that should be intimately her own. Meanwhile, Marcela is also trying to close the distance from her sisters that opened during her years in the jungle. “Policarpa” is only thirty pages long, but it is as complex as a novel.

Not that length matters much when it comes to Ospina’s narrative nesting. In the collection’s shortest story, “Occasion,” we spend ten pages and only a few days with Zenaida at her nanny job, watching a relationship unfold between Zenaida and Isabela, her young charge. Although the story is mainly about Isabela’s desire to keep Zenaida for herself, it is also about their bodies and how they both control and do not control what happens to them. The story is additionally about Isabela’s mother in a sideways but significant way, and Marcela reappears as well, as Zenaida’s sister. Finally, like “Policarpa” and “Collateral Beauty,” this story is also about words, writing, literacy, and narrative, a preoccupation that the rest of the collection sustains. Ospina skilfully negotiates these many juxtapositions and layers, and although listing them for the purposes of discussion risks making the book sound busy, they all feel natural on the page.

One of the more interesting elements of the collection is the way the different stories are connected. On the surface this appears to be a simple bridging from a minor character with a cameo in one story who then receives her own point of view in another. Each story also features its own noticeable collection of body parts: fingers and shoulders and shins, sometimes a full torso or a face, but often nothing bigger than a nail here or a whisker there. Over the course of the collection these assortments become, in an unusual but striking way, a visual repetition that links the stories as strongly as the reappearance of different characters. Eventually, as the body parts echo backward and forward throughout the book, it feels almost like a map of an entire body is being delicately constructed beneath the reader’s gaze.

Of course, gaze cannot be separated from the book’s playful approach to display. In “Saving Young Ladies,” for example, Aurora avoids writing a novel she’s meant to be working on by alternately spying on a girls’ home across the street and watching the different balconies of her own building. These are, in turn, filled with young men staring with rapt attention at the same young girls who are otherwise hidden behind the high walls of their school. The girls, too, are often looking back at Aurora’s apartment building. Everyone is watching everyone else, and there are many scenes of people moving toward and away from various windows, as if these different characters were all testing how much of themselves to give over to another person’s gaze while also wanting to be the one who gazes. These interactions aren’t necessarily sinister. At one point Aurora confirms what Ospina is subtly laying out, when she admits her belief that “the intimate choreographies of that house passed through the charged territory of the gaze.”

Although there’s a sense that this collection could easily be longer, these stories can stand multiple readings. Despite its brevity — the six stories barely reach 100 pages — Variations on the Body is satisfyingly full. Rich inner landscapes are on offer, as well as gestures toward the collective landscapes of history and literature.

Rounding out the volume, translator Heather Cleary’s introductory note goes far beyond a handful of remarks intended to clarify any quirks of language; her essay is a rich appraisal and description of the particular literary voice and techniques that Ospina wields in her work. On the level of the text, Cleary’s voice is already present in its role as conduit for Ospina’s Spanish into the reader’s English, but including it in this other, more academic way serves to highlight how this book is not just a collection but a composition of distinct yet related parts, a successful interplay of variations and voices.

+++

+

+