I read all but the last eight pages of this short novella in a coffee shop while my girlfriend was shopping for Christmas gifts. By the time she met me, I felt lost and wondered if I should go back and read it again before finishing. Then, when I picked it back up a few weeks later, I found that the final pages tied things together quite nicely and left me satisfied with the novella as a whole. I wished that I had been less distracted by the shoppers filing in and out of the coffee shop, mixed with the music in my headphones with which I tried to mute their holiday conversations; if I had finished the book in one sitting I wouldn't have felt vaguely dissatisfied with it for the past few weeks. Although, maybe feeling lost in a book called "The Lost Horse" isn't altogether undesirable, and, considering that I found ample reason to appreciate it in the end, I should feel happy for the way I read it. I enjoyed being lost in the memories of Felisberto, especially when his method of looking back at the past made more sense. I'm glad I went ahead and finished this exercise in the recollection and analysis of people, objects and experiences of one's childhood, filtered through the flow of time and the effects of the surrounding world.

The book is divided into two parts, roughly equal in length. The first part is a look back at the narrator's piano lessons with a lady named Celina. He lists the objects in her room and his childhood experiences with them; he talks about Celina's methods of teaching and discipline, and the way that as a child he thought that he was secretly manipulating her to fall in love with him. His mother and grandmother accompany him to piano lessons, and his memories of his family mix with those of Celina and the room where she gives lessons. As he documents his past, he seeks to revisit it and record his memories of Celina and the objects he associates with her, in the way that they have endured in his mind as he ages. I especially enjoyed his explanation of how Celina's memory came to him:

"It was on one of those nights,as I was calculating the sum of years past as if they were coins that I had let slip through my fingers without any great caution, when I was visited by the memory of Celina. This was unsurprising, as would be the visit of an old friend who came to pay me visits now and again. No matter how tired I was, I could always muster a smile for my recently-arrived friend."

The second part is where I started to really feel lost: the narrator is writing his recollections, but he's constantly being influenced by a "partner" as he writes (the word used is "socio," which connotes a business sort of relationship). His partner affects his memories and the way that they enter his mind, making it more difficult for him to put his thoughts on paper in the way that he wants to; his influence is often a nuisance which prohibits the narrator from continuing to tell the story of his past, with Celina and the piano lessons and the things in her house. He's still trying to write about these things, but they're clouded over by the outside influence. This is where the story got pretty cloudy for me as well. At the end, the partner's identity is exposed and reconciled with the story of the narrator's past, along with a few other outside elements that wandered into his memories, shifting and altering them.

Reading this book in conjunction with Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling gave me a pair of glimpses into the author's past, with both books delving into memories of his childhood piano teachers. His thoughtful study of memories and the way that things change in our minds as seen through the lenses of time and experience make me want to consider him a Uruguayan Proust (this based on the meager 250-odd pages of Proust I read in Un amour de Swann); these books also make me want to really get started on À la recherche du temps perdu, because both novellas (El Caballo Perdido and Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling), combined with my cursory understanding of Proust's literary investigations into the past, make me want to believe that I would appreciate his books and that they would in turn help me appreciate Felisberto Hernández even more. I imagine him reading Proust and really digging it, deciding as he thought back on former teachers that he too could riff on times gone by in his own corner of the world.

I found a small collection of anecdotes related to this novella at the following link: http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/fhernandez/obra/obra_08.htm. In it, his daughter, Ana María says that "Before his death my father said that El Caballo Perdido was his favorite work." He dedicated a copy of the book to her with the words "The two of us will ride on the back of the lost horse toward our destiny, and we shall never set foot on the ground." ( )