The curious complications of Manuel Gonzales

Full title: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Author: Manuel Gonzales

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 304 pages, paperback
Publisher: Riverhead (2013)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

It’s pretty hard to find a word able to satisfactorily define the kind of prose Manuel Gonzales writes. One might be tempted to say fantasy, because there’s a lot of out-of-this-world stuff in the volume (zombies, werewolves, swamp monsters, unicorns etc.), but the term wouldn’t do justice to anything in its proximity. Fantasy is about Lala-lands (I’m sure there are better words than these to name them, but what the heck), with no connections to the one we’re in. Well, that definition wouldn’t even scratch the surface, because most of Gonzales’s style relies precisely in the realistic effect they deliver, in spite of all the crazy things he makes up. Then how about magical realism? That would explain pretty well the mix of reality and less-than-reality that scream at you from every single story. But wait. Magical realism goes about doing things so as to avoid drawing anybody’s attention to the artificial nature of the ‘magic’ involved. A magical realist who writes short stories (let’s say in the tradition of Julio Cortázar and/or Gabriel García Márquez) would have butterflies filling a room just like that, or an inundation in an apartment overflowing into the street – and there would be no wink addressed to the reader. But with the stories in Gonzales’s collection the reader is constantly given that friendly nudge in the ribcage: the got-it? kind of jolt that indicates that hey, don’t forget, this is a work of fiction.

Here’s how a story by Manuel Gonzales takes place. We’ve got a situation. A crazy situation. I mean a crazy-crazy situation. Like a music composer speaking through his ears. That’s just to bring a simple example to the table. Then, once the reader has rolled his/her eyes, the party starts. Everything that follows is a series of reinforcements to the framework of this outlandish situation. In most cases, the situation is so out of touch with reality (I was going to say so schizophrenic) that the reader’s attention is almost guaranteed. And once you’re in, Gonzales can work on further complications. They are pretty good pieces of narrative work, these complications. And they manage to build a universe of Gozalesque atmosphere, where everything is possible and everything is likely to turn really bad.

Ok, now. My favorite. We’re talking about a story only six pages in length, but an excellent example of a narrative complication that would look great in a film. “Cash to a Killing” is about these two guys, professional hitmen by the sound of it, who are observed while burying their latest victim. That’s the gist. One can see it with ease. But things get complicated. And more complicated. And more complicated. So everything evolves from bad to worse to disastrous, only to finish in a comic twist so sad that it’s actually tragic. Summarizing the story would be cruel and an unpardonable spoiler to boot. So I guess I can only recommend it. Anybody interested, remember: “Cash to a Killing.” Luckily, it’s been published in 2007 in the Esquire, so available online.

Manuel Gonzales. Source: The Daily Beast

Now, to speak of the title story, let’s say it’s a modern version of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput. As the title indicates, though, the little men have been replaced by the narrator’s wife, who’s turned small because the narrator himself, a mad scientist of sorts, has done it to her. Complications appear here too. The wife doesn’t like being belittled so. Literal diminution wouldn’t sit well with anybody, male or female, would it? So she sets up traps for the husband, he isolates her in a miniature house, she cheats on him with a colleague who’s miniaturized himself to do the job, he wants to kill her, she wants to kill him, and the story goes on and on. It doesn’t even reach a clear conclusion, if that helps. But that’s exactly what makes it interesting: the whole infrastructure of events and incidents that seem absolutely okay once we have accepted the idea that there’s a character turned into a mini-person.

What’s also noticeable in the volume is the series of so-called “Meritorious Lives.” Five of them. They are short pieces that outline the life of fictional characters but in ways that mimic the tone of biographies. Hence their titles, of course. Take this one for an example: “Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life.” Could the character mentioned in the title be the author? No it cannot be. Not only because of the extra Juan in the appellation but also because the character is said to have lived a couple of centuries ago (1804-1848). An innkeeper and a forger of letters, this Juan Manuel Gonzales participates in a comedy of situations that, in the spirit of the collection’s many twists, turns out to be a hard-to-distinguish conundrum between humor and tragedy. Once again, complications upon complications, in a story whose central event is an epistolary exchange between two young lovers whose love is interdicted by the boy’s tyrannical father. Juan Manuel Gonzales is not the protagonist of the story. And yet, he gets caught up in the tangle and becomes important; although his importance is somehow put under a question mark by the surprise in the end. With a story line that emulates the classic narrative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century romances, this piece brings about mistakes and misunderstandings to levels similar to say, some of Borges’s twists. And all in no more than three pages.

With all this, in nine cases out of ten, it looks as thought the author had a helluva lot of fun writing. You get this feeling that he enjoyed adding layers and incidents to a text so much that he just couldn’t stop. That’s why stories rarely end where the reader expects. There’s often one more thing to say, one more detail to add. And so, as it sits, the collection might very well be unfinished. At the end of the day, there’s so much more a story can contain.

Narrative appetizers by Sheila Heti

Full title: The Middle Stories

Author: Sheila Heti

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 160 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2012)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

You know you’re in for a feast of fiction when you open a book to titles such as “The Princess and the Plumber,” “Mermaid in a Jar,” “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” or “The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates.” Thirty such titles are lined up at the start line in Sheila Heti’s second edition of The Middle Stories. The volume, boasting nine additions to the cast of characters of the first take (2001), is a collection of minuets in prose with roots in the tradition of fairy tales and with branches in various offshoots of postmodernity.

By employing an identical tone and a unitary spatial and chronological progression, Heti managed to solve one of the most threatening aspects of short-story collections: unity. All her texts sound the same. I don’t mean this in a bad sense but on the contrary, as a tribute to the positive qualities of her prose.

There is a rhythm proper to fairy tales, in which sentences rise and fall so as to accommodate the reader/listener to the tempo of the telling. That rhythm, repetitive and ritualistic, has its proper utility: it is meant to reassure the reader/listener that they are in familiar territory, that what’s going to happen won’t do them any harm. That’s precisely what one finds in The Middle Stories too. Random example, the near-iambic scansion in the following opening paragraph, with special emphasis on the first sentence (“The Favorite Monkey”):

“They lay under the tree in the morning June air and breathed in each other’s whispers. That’s how romantic it was under the tree – under any tree! And nobody made them leave or come out of it or shake it off.”

This is what makes the stories familiar. This, as well as the easy embracing of the fantastic, in ways that keep no secret of their affiliation to fairy tales. At least these two elements make the collection a ride worth taking. And speaking of rides, I assume the brevity of the pieces collected in the volume is likely in tune with what we like to call ‘the modern life.’ Taken in isolation, these texts are tiny morsels of storytelling for the use of the hurried commuter, who has only this long to finish one text, and who needs to reach resolutions before reaching destinations. The Middle Stories delivers this sense of quick fixes lined up in a continuum of little episodes to be consumed like appetizers between this stop and the next. Mostly two to three pages in length, the stories manage narrative timing with a specialist’s exactitude. One wouldn’t find it hard to spot the austere style, the dialogues that don’t have much time to dwell on deep psychologies, the generous time lapses, the preference for outlines rather than full portraitures. All this is good and feels good when read, because it rings that familiar bell of fairy tales which, short and specific, take no prisoners in the battle for efficiency of expression.

Sheila Heti. Source: The Times-Picayune

Also from the fairy-tale molds emerges this noticeable tendency towards titles that grab (see above), followed by introductory sentences that pursue the lead announced by said titles. To illustrate, here’s the story called “The Giant,” and more specifically the way it starts:

“There was a giant in their town. His name was Sal. Everybody laughed as he walked by and said things like, ‘Hey, giant!’ and waved and grinned and elbowed their dates and stuff like that, which the giant tolerated only because he was a giant. It was part of his lot to be way bigger than everybody and teased mercilessly for being so.”

And so, following the above, there’s no doubt as to what the stories are about. The title makes it clear; the opening paragraph makes it clearer. Once again, a busy commuter must appreciate the slight of hand, although they have a wee bit of work to do for themselves before they can say the stories have been well comprehended.

Heti rarely describes characters through references to their physical features. When those are present, they’re often limited to very elusive hints. It’s often more important that “Eleanor was fond of ice cream” (“Eleanor”) or that “there was sweat under her arms” (“A Few Adventures of the Young Fornicator”) or that “Marcus was getting a headache” (“Janis and Marcus”). Or, when further narration is involved, it’s more important for things to go like this: “One boy was taller, and the three went slowly down the street, and it was cold” (“The Girl Who Planted Flowers”). Or like this: “A little old woman who never stopped smiling walked into the kitchen from her garden” (“The Raspberry Bush”). The pleasure the author takes in playing the good cards of brevity is noticeable throughout.

On another hand, connections between elements are often short-circuited in the manner just illustrated through the last two sample sentences. As a result, whatever stands in the place of description is puzzling, dazzling, nonplussing. But that’s exactly what gives the stories the flavor they have: this sense of rapid fires after rapid fires, this economy of means, this austerity.

Heti prefers to make her characters perform little sketches in front of their readers, because she wants to use narration as a means of description. Some stories are entirely conceived as such, although these portrayals are well disguised behind plot lines. How does one know, thought, that they’re only disguises? Because a lot of these stories don’t have conclusions. They make full use of the cliff-hanger trick to remain suspended in the reader’s mind and to create tiny tornadoes in their consciousness. They don’t distribute well-chewed closures, and when there is anything resembling moralitas at all, one can be sure that it is done in order to enforce sarcasm.

And so the general musicality of the thirty pieces in the collection is mostly jocular. In spite of the fact that many situations depicted in them are on the sad side of things (read again the opening to “The Giant”), the telling doesn’t feel depressed. This rhythmic parade lifts the texts to that innocent skipping-rope realism that characterizes fairy tales, in which even the most outrageous fantasy is understood to be real. Because that’s what the story dictates.

Computers and cigarettes

Full title: My Documents

Author: Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 244 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Alejandro Zambra has always acted as a writer who writes about a writer's life (Hemingway updated, Roberto Bolaño’s re-embodied?). His latest volume, the collection My Documents, goes about peering again into things that make up the profession’s paraphernalia. For Zambra, the most important of these things are books and computers. Books have their special place, close to the Platonic ideal, so nothing’s changed in the library area; admiration, respect, veneration: all untouched, all good and (strange to say) ordinary. What is out of the everyday (narratively speaking) is the presence of computers. Still young in spite of their half-century of supremacy, PCs and their offspring seem to be slow in taking a place in literature. There’s a sense that they don’t have much to add to a story, that their presence is more likely to cause harm than charm.

But computers do have a role to play. For one thing, they provide memory, which is what writing has always been about, and which is what writing is always going to be about. In "Memories of a Personal Computer," the protagonist and his girlfriend experience the machine as a novelty with potential. They write up their poems on it, they love and hate each other under the PC’s gaze. When the computer works, their relationship works too. When the computer breaks, they too go each their separate way. What’s left of their adventure is a computer memory from which all data has been erased. The story ends with the PC in this state of purity: a blank hard drive deposited in an old carcass. The protagonist's son, an adolescent already over-versed in computer work, takes the object given to him as a gift to an underground location, symbolic setting for a work of disremembering.

"[He] went to the basement to find a place to store the computer, where it has been ever since, waiting, as they say, for better times to come."

With an ending like this, fairytale-style, the story reads like a fable about memory. It’s a story in which the computer too is a protagonist: we find it newly-born in the beginning, and we see it decrepit in the end, its narrative cycle gone full circle.

Alejandro Zambra. Source: Acabo de leer... Y me gusta

If computers are aids to memory, cigarettes are aids to other things that writers do. "I Smoked Very Well" reads like a praise to the vice in the title. The protagonist has just managed, via chemical intakes, to hinder his urge to smoke his lungs off. But what he finds at the end of the tunnel is not joy; it’s the opposite. If there was ever a connection between computers and cigarettes, it becomes clear when the protagonist (a writer with a smoker’s problem or a smoker with a writer’s problem) realizes that the chemicals in his medical treatment have made it impossible to enjoy at all his former love for smoking:

"I feel perplexed, and bruised. It's as though someone were gradually erasing all the information related to cigarettes from my memory. And that strikes me as sad.
I'm a very old computer. I'm an old but not entirely broken computer. Someone touches my face and keyboard with a kitchen rag. And it hurts."

Smoking-is-important-to-writers is the message conveyed throughout the story. The cigarette doesn't only serve as a prop; it isn't only something a writer holds in one hand while with the other hand he's writing. The cigarette marks a fundamental difference between a writer and the rest of the world (a question of status as much as a question of profession):

"What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth, with the skill of an anxious puppy, the pack of cigarettes he had hidden in the sand. Non-smokers don't understand these stories. They think that they're exaggerated; they read them cavalierly. A smoker, on the other hand, treasures them."

The fear of losing memory, addressed at point blank in "Memories of a Personal Computer," reaches here the same traumatic height, but its weight is different, because it is made much more personal. Smoking, a vice that threatens the body, puts the soul in a greater impasse when it ceases to be near. Zambra writes up a credo to mitigate this loss, but one that feels sad rather than hopeful:

"I remember that brilliant and unequivocal phrase of Italo Svevo's: 'Reading a novel without smoking is impossible.'
But it's possible, it is. I don't remember anything I read, though. I read badly. I don't know if I've just read a good novel badly or a bad novel well. But I read, it's possible."

The protagonist, who has lost appetite for reading and writing, who has been thrust into this despair of growing sad when the body is cured, makes the cigarette part of the syntax of creation. He's grown wise enough by now (this is close to the end of the story) to see with clarity the link between smoking and composition:

"Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.
I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or the absence of an answer. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon."

And so poetry arises from despair, metaphors from lack of punctuation, a writer’s angst from running out of smokes. What’s left, then? As always, memory. Of how writing must be done, of what cigarettes taste like, of what computers are good at. Almost every story in Alejandro Zambra’s collection has a reason to reflect on the above, because at the end of the day being a writer makes one dependent on these props. No writer is free. They all must be set up/upset by some rituals.

The ingenious prose of Nic Low

Full title: Arms Race

Author: Nic Low

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 250 pages, paperback
Publisher: Text Publishing (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Being a character in Nic Low’s first collection of short stories would be nothing short of a great vacation. You’d be taken places you never imagined or never thought of visiting during your lifetime. India. Laos. Mongolia. The Australian desert. A New Zealand coast town. San Francisco. London. Melbourne. New Zealand again. And some more. Wouldn’t your character life look like a traveler’s map if you took the journeys advertised by the volume?
Pick and choose – Master Low will take you there in a few pages and give you the ride of your life.

Not only do the stories in Arms Race grow beautifully in such geographic amplitudes, you’d also be given the chance to travel multidimensionally. Like, for instance, getting to a London of a future where all you can consume to stay alive is megabytes. This is the case of “Data Furnace,” a story where Low shows the traces of a true master storyteller.

What is a master storyteller? Someone who leaves the reader wondering how the hell he’d come up with that or with that or with that.
Going into details would ruin the pleasure of reading, I know, I know. But unfortunately you can only talk about Nic Low’s stories if you commit, repeatedly, the crime of giving the show away. That’s how good you feel after having read, one after the other, the twelve stories in the volume, asking, at the last page, if there were any more of them on the way.
So beware: the following may contain spoilers.

To take “Data Furnace” as a model and give it a brief summary, what have we got? We’ve got the city of London caught up in an apocalyptic winter. First stop, take a look at how he describes the city:

“I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned spires of the City: they’re all so deformed by frost they look like they were designed by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.”

Good, isn’t it? Atmospheric to the point where you feel your bones penetrated by cold.

And this is just to give a taste of what all the texts in the volume read like: with aplomb, with wit, with clarity, with a baroque tendency of exaggerating the contours, but only lightly, with a candid touch not to make the landscapes too foreign. There is, indeed, a sense that, no matter where you are in these stories, no matter what the location or the situation or the purpose, you’re never in need of a compass: you can do it on your own; you can journey through these places like a pro.
If there’s one element that stands out in Nic Low’s stories, it’s got to be his associations. In descriptions, you’re always driven away from the ‘natural’ course. The “gutted apartments” – who would have thought of using that adjective to describe an empty habitation? It’s the adjectives that do the job, of course. Adjectives, those no-no’s of creative writing classes, are Low’s best allies. He knows how to deploy them and deploys them to get the best effect. Like in an arms race for the conquest of readership.

Source: Te Karaka

But to return to the story. Temperatures have gone so low and for such a long time that people have been leaving the streets, the houses, the whole urban space. All but a few; to be more precise: the narrator, his beautiful colleague Umi, and the opportunistic homeless figure known under the name of Old Man Canary. The first two work as IT specialists in a company that has just shut down its last server room. They refuse to leave the city when everyone else is running for the airports like crazy. They stay and they come up with a brilliant idea. Since there’s nothing else to burn to keep themselves warm (every single tree in London has been cut to pieces and consumed in domestic fires), they will use data. They will get the servers to heat up.

This is one of those situations where the reader goes, Oh, I see. Because we all know that computers do give off heat (that’s why they’re equipped with coolers!). But in order to generate enough heat in the servers, the two of them need traffic. They need to get the servers working like never before. Solution: shoot a YouTube video and wait for it to go viral. Easy to say, not so easy to do, since online audiences are best known for their volatility and unpredictability. But a new brilliant idea pops out of Umi’s head. She connects a terrarium to the servers. In the terrarium there’s a tropical frog. The frog needs warmth just like the humans. But there’s a trick to it. As we are told a little earlier (by way of a story that sounds like an urban myth), if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it in cold water and heat that water gradually, it will stay there, allowing itself to be cooked to death. This is where the ingenious idea resides. With a few videos and some hacking that brings traffic to a decent level, the terrarium starts getting warmer and warmer. The heat from the server is transferred to it. It grows hotter and hotter as the viewers turn the event into a share frenzy of epic proportions. Everything’s broadcast live and soon bets are placed on whether the frog will jump out or not. It’s this betting that gets the traffic flowing. The world is taken with the madness of this new form of entertainment. And behind all this – the logic of data flooding:

“We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.”

I have to stop here, though. “Data Furnace” still has an ending that needs to be read, not overheard. But after all this effort to summarize, I think there's one thing that can be said about Nic Low with some degree of certainty: his stories are imaginative like you haven’t seen for a long time. The pleasure with which he tells these stories, the succulent texts full of images and metaphors that make your mouth froth as you read along, the pace of the narration – all these things make the collection impossible to ignore. As also impossible to ignore must be Nic Low’s current project, set to be launched in 2016.

A Christmas unsuitable for kids

Full title: The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

Author: John Updike (Drawings by Edward Gorey)

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 32 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications (2006)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

In the month of compulsory gratification all responsibilities are heavy. We live on the dividing line between giving and taking, precariously playing both roles with affliction, buying more than we can carry and seeing/witnessing/watching more than it's humanly acceptable to the ocular apparatus and the mind that comes with it.

With the corporatized, profit-driven Christmas growing around us like the dark force in some B-class horror movie, we hope for a breath of fresh air, which would shake the hell out of this too-familiar spectacle and bring to light something we can learn to appreciate with joy.

What would do? A book, perhaps; a booklet, a series of sentences, a package of quotable quotes. Anything, no matter how small, only bring us something able to spell out the very thoughts we've never given ourselves enough courage to utter.

That book, that booklet, that series of sentences – could be, why not, John Updike's tiny little The Twelve Terrors of Christmas.

To make things clear from the get-go, Updike doesn't dismiss the fiction in the picture. He wouldn't. Why would he, since the fiction is good, the fiction is heart-warming? If he has something to say against anything, it's not the story that takes the brunt of his satire. He deals with the other fictions, the ones we find on the other side of celebration: the wrongly understood idea of merry-making, the mercantilism vows of ever-buying, the programmed blindness to the ideology of mirth.

The text of The Twelve Terrors of Christmas is already over two decades old. It was first published in The New Yorker, in 1992. Its structure poses no problem. Twelve vignette-sized pieces of satire, all easy to swallow, like pills prescribed against seasonal nausea, after having binged on everything that's bad for you. Every one of these tiny writings asks one rhetorical question or more, and with them Updike seems to instate something I'd happily call the Season of Rhetorical Questions. It's a season in which we are invited to bring out some of our best hidden doubts: the doubts we have learnt to overcome, in the name of the consumerist glory rolling like a tsunami over us every year. Some of these questions are funny, asked for the sake of a joke. In the case of "Santa: The Man" (the first vignette in the booklet), Updike has this to say/ask/interrogate:

"Loose-fitting nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit, funny rummy smell when you sit on his lap. If he's such a big shot, why is he drawing unemployment for eleven months of the year?"

Remark the double-adjectives in the first sentence. Then, once you've swallowed them whole, you can ask the relevant question. How often have you inserted the word "unemployment" in a sentence about Christmas? How many times have you doubted the beauty of the season in order to make light around its shoddy premises?

So you're getting the point.

These funny rhetorical questions are at their funniest and most rhetorical in the next text, the one entitled (with so much more promise, I would say), "Santa: The Concept." Once again, the point is apparent from the very title. And if it wasn't (damn the abstraction!), then here are the questions, rhetorical as ever, calling for the recognition of what has always been lurking in the back of your mind, only, perhaps, less jokingly:

"Why would anybody halfway normal want to live at the North Pole on a bunch of shifting ice floes? Or stay up all night flying around the sky distributing presents to children of doubtful deservingness?"

These are, obviously, questions best kept out of reach of your children, if what you're after is the preservation of an essentially beautiful fiction. But better be ready for the time, not too far away from the present moment, when you will have to give them this book and tell them, 'Read on, my darling victim of the grown-up lore, and laugh at your happy moments of yesteryear.' BTY, this ain't an Updike line, but how I wish I'd find it in his booklet! At least for the balancing effect of its tragic tone.

Source: From Shopping to Saving

But do not think the aim has gone amiss. Updike too wants to make apparent the tragic twist of the event of Christmas. In order to do so, he goes for our emotional jugular: our memories. And there he comes across carols. "The Carols," the booklet's vignette number seven, makes sad appeal to the withered power of those seasonal songs we used to sing in angelic voices, but which we're now sending toward different skies: the heights of shopping-mall ceilings. The statements and the questions on this page go as follows (in full quotation):

"They boom and chime from the vaulted ceilings of supermarkets and discount malls - and yet the spirits keep sinking. Have our hearts grown so terribly heavy, since childhood? What has happened to us? Why don't they ever play our favorites? What were our favorites? Tum-de-tum-tum, angels on high, something, something, sky."

And with the pondering of Christmas's grey area comes the confidence to dive into the darker matters, the real worries, the truly ridiculous anxieties, the awful truths of our Christmas debilitation. They grow out of the latter half of the dozen texts, as in "The Specials" ("Isn't there something else on, like wrestling or Easter Parade?"), in "Fear of Not Giving Enough," in "Fear of Not Receiving Enough" ("Three dull neckties and a pair of flannel-lined work gloves - is this really how they see you?"), in "Fear of Returns" ("The humiliating descent into mercantilism's boiler room"), and culminating with the most tenebrous of all Christmas moments, the moment when it is all over, when all lights are off, when everything has turned, indeed, pitch black, and when the mercantile world appears scary in its offensive nudity: "Is this Hell, or just an upturn in consumer confidence?"

Here it is, dear former boys and girls, dear current ladies and gentlemen: the drama of our having grown out of childhood. One strong-enough reason I have, like Updike, to say, again: 'Don't allow your kids to read this book.' Not yet...

The freedom and the pain

Full title: Broken Nest and Other Stories

Author: Rabindranath Tagore (Translated by Sharmistha Mohanti)

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 129 pages, paperback
Publisher: Westland (2009)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The four stories in the volume have many things in common. They are stories about women, but not just that. They are stories about women caught in the whirlwind of a fundamental change. They are stories about women gaining access. Not to social or political recognition, but to a special kind of spiritual enlightenment, an awakening that puts their former subjecthood into sharp perspective.

The rise to spiritual freedom is always celebrated in Tagore's bucolic way: the characters are inscribed in a circuit of natural happiness, a sort of poetic ecology where the human being finds a gentler, more manageable form of the Sublime than the one that overwhelmed European readers in the nineteenth century.

"Every day, while listening to his voice the sky on the east became blood- red, next to the clouds there appeared streaks of sunlight, the darkness would fall away like the burst calyx of a blossoming bud, and the red flower of the morning would bloom little by little in the lake of the sky."

So goes a description in "The Ghat's Tale." But this is only one example. Hundreds of others can be found throughout the texts. One needs to read them to see.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Source: Voices, Compassion, Education

What's also common in all four stories is the significance of writing. When the rise of the heroines is measured, their progress takes the shape of the distinction between orality and literacy. The written form seems to always win. When looked at with a cold, critical eye, this may seem to be akin to playing the winning card of the empire. At the end of the day, the entire ideology of expansion has been built on this promise of acculturation, where writing was equated with enlightenment. But Tagore doesn't speak of English literacy. By writing he means Bengali writing. And by it he means a system of inscription that brings the spiritual out of its hiding place, into a world where it has to antagonise the transitory standards of public discourse.

When he does make reference to English, as, for instance, in the title story, Tagore does it in the tone of satire. Bhupati, the Chekhovian tragic character who sees in the Empire an unfulfillable (for him) promise, fails precisely there: in replicating the very writing standards he's decided to emulate.

"Ever since childhood he had liked writing and delivering speeches in English. Even when there was no need, he would write letters to English language newspapers, and even if he had nothing to express he would always say a word or two at formal gatherings."

The fact that Bhupati has trained himself in the journalistic discipline is significant: he deals in politics, where the Empire dominates with vindictiveness, as all empires do. In such a context, there's little room for him to grow. His wife, however, Charu, is of a different cut. Living in the shadow of her husband's poorly understood patriarchalism, she finds escape (Bovaric creature that she is) in literature. Her pleasures may be simple; at the end of the day, the literature she reads is hopelessly pathetic, lachrymose, melodramatic. But what she gets from the books she reads is precisely this respite from the political illusions of Bhupati. Out of an illusion and into another – this is how Tagore traces the trajectory of Charu's liberation-cum-tragedy. She learns the craft of writing from a man (her brother-in-law) who seems different but proves otherwise.

The story of Charu's education is complex. It is not a mere impregnation with knowledge, but rather a form of exchange. Charu and Amal learn from each other; or rather, they push each other into the world of writing. But the woman is bound to find the limits of her destiny. The bliss of writing is short-lived. While Amal rises to prominence as a consequence of his mastering of writing (a crooked public recognition for a talent that consists of mere reproductions of traditional models), Charu remains a domestic miracle. Her work, published in a prominent periodical, is innovative. It receives recognition from a critic who has a knack for originality. But this is not what she's after: not public recognition (which had defeated her husband and had driven Amal away from India, into the heart of the Empire), but private, spiritual growth. This growth means pain (not unlike, perhaps, the maturation of a body that grows unnaturally), and Tagore takes the opportunity to elaborate a lot on the subject.

The same growth is apparent in "The Ghat's Tale." In this story, where the narrative voice belongs, very peculiarly, to that most Indian of aquatic edifices, the ghat, a widowed woman finds spiritual rebirth when she meets a sannyasi. Here too, departure is necessary. Like Amal in "Broken Nest," the stronger male character is obliged to leave (in a way European readers might find, again, melodramatic) because their grander projects make a mundane relationship impossible.

And again, in "The Postmaster," an illiterate girl who learns writing from her master, has to part with the object of her adoration as soon as her enlightenment is accomplished. As observed by the editor/translator of the volume, Sharmistha Mohanty, water is an element of separation in Tagore's stories. In "Broken Nest," Amal leaves for England, travelling by a cruise ship. In "The Ghat's Tale," the widowed Kusum ends up offering herself as a sacrifice to the river Ganga. In "The Postmaster," the master becomes conscious of this separation while the boat he has boarded is slowly departing, leaving the recently enlightened girl to cry silently her disappointment.

So it can be agreed that, in each of these stories, enlightenment comes at a cost. It is the price of liberation that these characters are paying. And because of that, the human element is mostly sad, despondent. Hope and celebration only come about in the passages where Tagore goes about describing nature. Nature which, to him, appears to be the truly luminous face of the world.

Fast prose, prompt delivery

Full title: Tenth of December

Author: George Saunders

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 288 pages, paperback
Publisher: Random House (2013)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As usual, George Saunders' talent for writing rapid, concise, essentialised prose doesn't take long to shine bright. Sentences run like this:

"I flew down the hill, pushed Ma inside, sat her on the stairs, grabbed Harris by the shirt, put my foot behind him, dropped him to the floor. Then held a match to the carpet on the stairs and, once it started burning, raised a finger, like, Quiet, through me runs the power of recent dark experience." (“Home”)

A lot is happening in this one swipe, let's admit it. To cut to the chase, the chief technique here is the list: narrative bits get strung together in the fashion of bullet points. But there is also this unique ability of Saunders' to work out his sentences so as to communicate maximum of information by minimum of means. He drops adjectives (99% of the possible ones, I would guess – a true Hemingwayan that he is), avoids exaggerations, and bets everything on montage. Montage, of course, wins. Every time.

Saunders is also very good at capturing the false quips of Americana – that spirit, that mixture of heroism and dull indifference, of exaltation mixed implacably with ignorance. Take for example the dialogue (or should we call it trialogue, judging from the number of characters involved in this discussion?) in the same story, “Home,” about the American foreign wars: a casual conversation that raises one the essential questions of military bravery: Whose heroism? Or even more brutally: Who cares about it?

“I've been away a long time,” I said.
“Welcome back,” the first kid said.
“Where were you?” the second one said.
“At the war?” I said, in the most insulting voice I could muster.
“Maybe you've heard of it?”
“I have,” the first one said respectfully.
“Thank you for your service.”
“Which one?” the second one said.
“Aren't there two?”
“Didn't they just call one off?” the first one said.
“My cousin’s there,” the second said.
“At one of them. At least I think he is. I know he was supposed to go. We were never that close."
“Anyway, thanks,” the first one said, and put out his hand, and I shook it.
“I wasn't for it,” the second one said.
“But I know it wasn't your deal.” “Well,” I said.
“It kind of was.”
“You weren’t for it or aren’t for it?” the first said to the second.
“Both,” the second one said.
“Although is it still going?”
“Which one?” the first one said.
“Is the one you were at still going?” the second one asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Better or worse, do you think?” the first one said. “Like, in your view, are we winning? Oh, what am I doing? I don’t actually care, that’s what’s so funny about it!”

Saunders being Saunders, there's no shortage of characterisation in the volume. As per usual script, everything consists of brevity and efficiency. Characters are nothing if they don't behave as if some cataclysm was threatening the world and they had this single shot at telling everyone, with breathless haste, the story of their lives. As per the same script, there are often two or more characters in the same tableau, every one of them having their entire life summed up in a phrase or even (true narrative valor!) crammed into a word.

"I was currently the only working person in our family. Mom being sick, Beth being shy, Dad having sadly cracked his spine recently when a car he was fixing fell on him."

Not to understand from this that characters are built hastily, though. Not at all. In fact, many of them are capable of incredible complexities, as is the case, for instance, with the young characters in the opening story, “Victory Lap,” who reach maturity in the most tragic of ways: after killing and narrowly escaping rape, respectively.

Saunders' big advantage is that he knows the environments of his character very, very well. He uses this talent to build environments, so that the people he describes make sense because of the places they inhabit, whether these are a testing lab in a futuristic correction facility, the backyard of a house owned by a pair of obsessive-compulsive parents, a suburban setting where high social-capital needs fly dangerously low, etc. No matter what environment he chooses, Saunders shines in the art of describing the most trivial of details in terms that could be likened to field notes: scribbling down aspects of the quotidian and making it the play field of his characters. Then, based on these series of crude observations, truths come to the surface like water squirted out of a wet towel when you squeeze it like you mean it.

Source: Wicked Web

As already said in the beginning, from an ideological perspective, Saunders is very much invested in a critique of the American Illusion. He operates in an area for which there seems to be little precedent, and which I would call Institutional Realism. There is almost always an institution behind the scene of his short stories (if not a corporation, then the Army; if not the Army, then School). Following a trend he established as early as his first collection, back in 1996, Saunders takes a swipe at hierarchies, policies, corporate slavery, corporate bullying, high and/or middle-class consumerist tantrums, and things of similar import. Pharmaceutical companies are treated in the same ways as small family businesses. Never mind the differences in scale. What matters is the critique. What bothers is the logic of gain. What hurts is the cheap narcissism of the upstart. What's pitiful is the wasting of so many destinies. The list comprises the usual tropes of critical action. So Saunders is, after all, a proud member of the American satirists' elite of the Philip Roth kind, somewhere in the same boat with Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart, Ben Marcus, and a host of others – writers who can't help it when it comes to taking the piss, but at the same time take a deep breath to sigh with disappointment.

CharacteroLogics

Full title: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Author: George Saunders

Genre: Short stories and a novella
Attributes: 180 pages, paperback
Publisher: Riverhead (1997)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

I'd hate to be a character in George Saunders' stories, coz he would make me work my butt off and would throw me into the narrative bin as soon as I'm done with the labor.

By saying this I am touching (part of) the essence. The stories in the collection make full use of the characterological component and deal with almost everything through the agency of these poor (I mean mostly minor) characters met along the story line.

Saunders populates his texts with significantly large crowds of characters. Under normal circumstances, that would lead to organizational problems (chaos, to be more precise): how to manage these actors, how to send them off doing things, how to make sure you're not mixing them up, how to handle their crowd without seeming teacherly – that kind of organizational problems. But Saunders is a smart storyteller. He is well organized and he’s got a plan. He revels in the picaresque mode. In the picaresque (take Tom Jones for a good example), characters roam freely. They engage in actions without much interest in the outcome. They walk and drive and ride and hike and when they do so there's hardly ever a destination across the horizon – only the accidents that befall them, and for which they are forever grateful. When they meet other characters they look at them as nothing more than accidental encounters: no sweat, no piss, no hard sentiments.

So these are characters who, as I said, have a helluva lot to do. And they do it all in half a page or less. When they don't have things to do they have things to look at. When there are no things to look at they have a lot to talk about. Oh, yes, they talk. A. Lot. Especially the minor characters, who jump into discussions as if they didn't want to miss their only chance of self-affirmation. Which is very much the only shot they get (so – they’re actually right to be so jumpy after all).

Of course, these (and especially the narrators) are not mad characters. They are just overly perceptive. There's nothing escapes their wandering eyes. Nothing in the landscape, nothing in the demeanor of others. And they pepper their observations with considerable dozes of political analyses (mind you, well veiled behind narrative stunts).

George Saunders. Source: Slow Muse

There's one big thing everyone will tell you, in case I haven't said it already: George Saunders is a goddamn good storyteller. With this volume (his debut, no less, first published in 1996), you can see his favorite tools at work. The disengagement of the narratorial voice is one of them. Saunders builds his narration in such a way that he leaves you wondering if those things you've just seen unfolding on the page are the thoughts of the character, of the author, or (gee, now that's a thought!) perhaps your very own.

And then the way characters speak, as if they were all storytellers. Their ability to make a point in a jiffy is exquisite. Although sometimes they go overboard, saying, perhaps much more than a real person would say, or (if they're on the other side of the dialogue) waiting, patiently like hell, without interrupting, for the vociferous other to finish whatever it is they've got to say.

But this one aspect, about the speaking of Saunders' characters, is easy to justify, since every nut and bolt of his stories is put there with a single purpose in mind: to sing the narrative ode that puts the story together. I believe George Saunders has experimented, here as well as in his other volumes of fiction, with just about everything in his authorial sight that could aid the progression of a story.

So yes again, some of the techniques are easy to spot and they become a kind of trademark. As, for instance, the way new characters are introduced. It goes like this: the narrator bumps into a complete stranger. He knows nothing about the stranger: no name, no place, no space, no anecdotal detail. And with the narrator, we’re in the same blur. But luckily enough, through some kind of lucky coincidence, the narrator hears the stranger's name. And now (almost always starting from the sentence right next to the revelation), the new character is mentioned by the name we have just found out. We become intimate with the complete stranger, and the complete stranger starts telling their own story. With confidence. A very detailed story every time. We find out about their past, their present, their future, a thing or two about the relationships they are entertaining, and so the characters grow to life-size in no time.
But then, just as quickly as they appeared they disappear as well, and we're somehow left with the feeling that we've lost touch with a close acquaintance. We are, in other words, emotionally invested. And damn if we know how it's happened. It was maybe the familiarity of the landscape (names of places poured into the story until you have no choice but believe it's true); maybe the familiarity of the speech lines (they talk like Americans, breathe like Americans, drive cars, use furniture, dream about burgers like Americans – because, well, they are Americans); or maybe the familiarity of many situations (no way you'll find something over-the-top here, not even when you're in a post-apocalyptic setting). With all these options you never know what's hit you. But you're left with a good taste in your mouth after all. The taste of good stories. And that’s fine, because that’s what you've been looking for. So tick.

The scandal of an imagined murder

Full title: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Author: Hilary Mantel

Genre: Fiction, short stories
Attributes: 242p, hard cover
Publisher: Fourth Estate (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

It’s kind of hard to talk about Hilary Mantel’s latest collection of short fictions, after the rave and the anger created by the title story. Declaring that at one point in life she’d imagined assassinating Margaret Thatcher is, in some minds, almost equivalent to Mantel’s being guilty of the former PM’s death. Although the story I am talking about is straightforwardly fictional, it has managed to bring significant sensitivities to the surface, and thus turn all attention away from the obvious facts of the volume’s narrative significance.

Narratively put, therefore, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” depicts an old killer-meets-narrator situation. It’s about a radicalised sniper of Irish descent who enters the strategically situated apartment of a seemingly incautious woman, where he knows he can get the view for a perfect shoot. He’s determined to pursue his plan. At the same time, though, he is pursued by old habits, patriotic discourses, conventions of political martyrism, which seem, at times, to burden his conscience. One sentence describes him beautifully:

“He carried his own tea in his left hand and his gun in the right.”

The story is also about the inhabitant of the said apartment, a woman who gradually finds within herself the seeds for a similar radicalisation. Under the pressure of similar motivations, she grows steadily fond of the sentiment of wanting to kill the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Her reasons are commonly found, and because of this they are also merciless and acid-like:

“You can’t force pity from a government like hers. Why would she negotiate? Why would you expect it? What’s a dozen Irishmen to them? What’s a hundred? All those people, they’re capital punishers. They pretend to be modern, but leave them to themselves and they’d gouge eyes out in the public square.”

Here, in Mantel’s story, the demonization of Margaret Thatcher is performed to an extent where her becoming a target is no longer a moral problem but a statement of political retaliation.

“I thought there’s not a tear in her. Not for the mother in the rain at the bust stop, or the sailor burning in the sea. She sleeps four hours a night. She lives on the fumes of whisky and the iron in the blood of her prey.”

The story carries with it this constant moral tone of radicalism, mixed with the sarcasm and rhetoric of good old militant speeches. And that, indeed, makes it an interesting narrative. But “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” is not the only story in the collection. Things can be said about the other fictions too, because they have aspects in common. As is the case with the issues of place and space, for instance.

Hilary Mantel. Source: The Guardian

Un-settled characters roam Hilary Mantel’s stories. They advance into their destinies with a sense that the places they inhabit are too unpleasant to be liked. They seem to cherish the idea of being somewhere else. Some other place, maybe some other story too. The protagonists of “Sorry to Disturb” find it difficult to live in the city of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia (“this crazy city,” as one of them calls it). The narrator in “Harley Street” has the same problem of inadaptation to an urban setting that’s not quite up her alley:

“One day I’ll get further out of town. Somewhere just big enough for me. Somewhere small and quiet.”

Another thing these stories have in common is the theme of memory. Here, memory too (concerned not with space but with time) is a faulty mechanism. Throughout the volume there are plenty of occasions to prove it. In “Terminus,” the narrator struggles to remember a significant event in her relation to her dead father.

“My mind tried to provide occasions to which it could go back, but none occurred. I coveted something sweet, a glass of hot chocolate to warm my hands, an Italian wafer dusted with cocoa powder. But my mind was cold and my intention urgent.”

It is this urgency that produces the effect of anxiety at the thought of not being able to recollect what was meant to be meaningful; and Hilary Mantel’s protagonists (most of whom bear the burden of the narrator’s role as well) bump into events as if they had appeared there in an out-of-space-out-of-time fashion, or as if they were meant to stay hidden, like untold stories.

“Even after all this time it’s hard to grasp exactly what happened. I try to write it as it occurred but I find myself changing the names to protect the guilty.”

(“Sorry to Disturb”)

And speaking of memory, in “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” it’s highly significant that memory is of an event that never happened. So significant, it makes for a good reflection on the nature of chance; chance which, in essence, is a narrative matter – a matter of combinations:

“History could be otherwise. For there is the time, the place, the black opportunity; the day, the hour, the slant of the light, the ice-cream van chiming from a distant road near the bypass.”