"My Life in the City"

So I'm going to be teaching this story today by Sergio Troncoso, "My Life in the City," from the anthology Latino Boom, and I have fallen in love.  I need to get his collection, The Last Tortilla & Other Stories, because I've become a total Troncoso geek on the strength of this story alone. 

I don't know what it is, exactly, that's compelling me.  Here's my fumbling attempt:  "My Life in the City" (1999) feels like a twenty-first century story, and it feels international. 

It has that texture, like its sensibility is informed by the international literature of the last sliver of the last century, like its concerns are the improbable turns of an idiosyncratic consciousness, neutrally observed.  It feels more like now than a lot of the work we've been reading for class (which makes sense:  we started with "I Am Joaquin" and have been working chronologically forward; as a professor, I'm interested in all the work we've read, but as a writer, I'm excited by this).  "My Life in the City" feels honest, uninhibited, the voice of a watcher watching the ecstasy-hungry self as it moves through the world.  This is how it opens:

I almost left the City because I could not find myself there anymore.  I found many desires in the City.  My gaze would never settle on one thing.  It would jump from face to face to face.  I enjoyed watching the many beautiful women in the City.  Yes, I would study their faces and bodies.  I would imagine making love to them.  I would imagine their touch on my own body.  Sometimes they would smile in return.  Sometimes I would talk to them, and their eyes would sparkle.  Often they would turn away.  A few seemed angry at my open look.  But I never meant any harm.  I simply wanted to find myself there, to find someone, and I wanted to reach out.  But there was nothing there.  Or else, it was simply too far away.  They were too far away.  I was not there.  I did not know where I was.

Why do I like it so much?!  I mean, it does everything wrong, according to Creative Writing 101:  it tells instead of shows, there's not a lot of concrete sensory imagery, and the language isn't fresh ("their eyes would sparkle"?).  Much of the language is abstract and vague, very thinky, not very do-y.  And ultimately (spoiler alert), not a lot happens in the narrative:  basically, a guy goes on a date.  (I'm curious to hear what my students, a bright lot, will say.)

But I'm hypnotized by the thing.  It gives me the same kind of high that reading Kundera or Duras or Mercè Rodoreda gives me. 

!Necesito Troncoso!