Lisa St. Aubin de Teran left her home in a south London suburb aged sixteen to marry an exiled Venezuelan and travel around Italy with him and his friends. For seven years subsequently she lived on his remote sugar-cane hacienda in the Venezuelan Andes. Both experiences provided material for novels, published in the early 80s, and more recently for The Hacienda, a memoir. Her penchant for posing languidly in Edwardian dress (see the cover of The Hacienda) gives the impression that St. Aubin de Teran is a less-than-serious writer, which is a pity.
Southpaw, her latest collection of stories, has no author portrait, and by the end of the second paragraph of the very first story even the most sceptical should be convinced that she is a talented, observant and accomplished writer.
For the past ten years St. Aubin de Teran has lived in a small village in Umbria. The stories here all evolve around the two rural communities which she has come to know, in Venezuela and in Italy. As she says in the introduction: "in the absence of anywhere else to specifically claim as home, I have found an emotional home in other peoples roots."
The two communities, Venezuelan and Italian, are united by the theme expressed in her title. The stories are about outsiders, whose survival is as much due to their ability to absorb blows as to deliver them. St. Aubin de Teran responds wholeheartedly to both place and people, and is obviously a patient listener. The hours she has spent absorbing other people's lives give her stories an unusual veracity, both physical and mental. She is a magnificent story-teller, and has the unusual ability to retell the lives of an illiterate peasantry in such a way as to give their hopes and beliefs dignity and integrity. The best of these stories carry the weight of fable or folklore. "Eladio and the Boy" reveals the deep logic behind the apparently irrational obsession with an eagle that dominates the lives of a brain-damaged man and his dumb son. "Antonio Mezzanotte" portrays the life of an Umbrian village by following a blind man and recounting his past.
Those familiar with her novels and memoirs will occasionally recognise characters they know, but nothing is lost by encountering St Aubin de Teran's work for the first time in this form. In fact, her stories are a perfect introduction to the unusually wide range, both geographic and emotional, that she covers.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic