[On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.]
Strange Horizons/Samovar, July 28, 2025
“Oppressed” by Sakyajit Bhattacharya (translated by Rituparna Mukherjee)
“Cuca” by Alfonsina Storni (translated by Alina Lazar & Anna Evelyn White)
Reviewed by Francine Taylor
In “Oppressed” by Sakyajit Bhattacharya, three students named Siddhartha, Sunando and Indranil are trying to decide where to go drinking. Sidhu suggests they go to “Maidan.” The other two are horrified, this is apparently a place where something unpleasant happened when they were all drunk, and they all did something they regret. Indra agrees reluctantly and Sunando is bullied into accompanying his friends. It eventually comes out that the last time the three boys went to Maidan, they got very drunk and all of them participated in drowning a cat.
They each had a different reason for the cat-killing. Indra says the cat had reminded him of the engineer who stole his girl. Sidhu was distressed because his parents were fighting and all his anger came out at once. Sunando experienced bloodlust while watching his friends kill the cat.
The first half of the story was difficult to read. The writing seemed to jump randomly from subject to subject and had little to do with what I later discovered to be the main conflict. The characters were not likable, and nothing seemed to be happening. When it eventually became clear that the story was about the three boys facing something terrible that they had done at Maidan, and that by returning there they were trying to face their fears, it really started drawing me in.
Unfortunately, the ending never lived up to the promises made. Questions weren’t answered, some of the details seemed important but were never explained, and the story stopped before anything was resolved. I suspect that native speakers familiar with the culture would have been able to read more into the original than I did into the translation, but I found the story quite disappointing.
“Cuca” by Alfonsina Storni is written in first person, and narrated by a woman who is never named. The narrator first sees a woman named Cuca while looking out of her window at the street below. Cuca is fashionably dressed, and has a “gorgeous nape brushed with a mix of powders: moondust, coty rose, and sky river water.” It seems to the narrator that there is something odd about Cuca, and she first “burst(s) out laughing like a madwoman,” then runs down into the street, demanding to see the color of Cuca’s eyes which are described as “algae-filled, reptilian, discolored pupils, made of a far off glass, a glass extracted from the greenest, iciest night stars.”
After she explains to Cuca that she is abnormally impulsive, she and Cuca become friends, though “not intimate” ones. Cuca comes to her house daily, but the narrator is never comfortable around Cuca, always sensing something unwholesome and threatening about her. Cuca’s voice, especially, sounds artificial to the narrator.
The narrator’s obsession with Cuca grows. She comes to believe that Cuca has an artificial arm and feels a strong need to touch it, but cannot bring herself to do so. The thought of it makes her skin “crawl.”
The story requires a lot of reading between the lines, and as to its meaning, one reader’s interpretation is as good as another’s. The obsession that the narrator has with Cuca will probably be incomprehensible to the modern reader. It is clear that Cuca is a metaphor for a type of woman (In Buenos Aires, which is where the story was first published in 1926, “cuca” is often used as a slang term for female genitalia—similar to “pussy” in English) and much of the sensationalism seems to rest on things that would be commonplace now. Cuca is always surrounded by “interchangeable” men, and the message that I read in the story is that such women are seen as “empty” and “hollow.” I wasn’t sure whether the author’s intent was to suggest that promiscuous women were to be avoided, or to show how irrationally other women behave when faced with a woman who violates social norms. The fact that Alfonsina Storni was known as a feminist suggests the second, to me. One other interpretation might be that Cuca is transgender. It is never made clear what the narrator discovered about Cuca which horrified her so much, and “cuca” can be a euphemism for “penis,” giving the title a clever double meaning.
Even though we are not reading it in the original language, the translation has nicely preserved the author’s brilliance at building scenes. She leans heavily into metaphor, creating an atmosphere of doom hanging over the relationship between Cuca and the narrator. The ending suggests both alien horror and disturbing allegory, seamlessly blended, and leaves the final determination of Cuca’s nature to the reader.