Horacio Quiroga - Work

Work

Follower of the modernist school founded by Rubén Darío and being an obsessive reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was attracted to topics covering the most intriguing aspects of nature, often tinged with horror, disease, and suffering for human beings. Many of his stories belong to this movement, embodied in his work Tales of Love, Madness and Death.

Quiroga was also inspired by British writer Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), which is shown in his own Jungle Tales, a delightful exercise in fantasy divided into several stories featuring animals.

His Ten Rules for the Perfect Storyteller, dedicated to young writers, provides certain contradictions in his own work. While the Decalogue touts economic and precise style, using few adjectives, natural and simple wording, and clarity of expression, in many of his own stories Quiroga did not follow his own precepts, using ornate language, with plenty of adjectives and at times ostentatious vocabulary.

As he further developed his particular style, Quiroga evolved into realistic portraits (often anguished and desperate) of the wild nature around him in Misiones: the jungle, the river, wildlife, climate, and terrain make up the scaffolding and scenery in which his characters move, suffer, and often die. Especially in his stories, Quiroga describes the tragedy that haunts the miserable rural workers in the region, the dangers and sufferings to which they are exposed, and how this existential pain is perpetuated to succeeding generations. He also experimented with many subjects considered taboo in the society of early twentieth century.