31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 16: “Testicular Cancer vs. The Behemoth” by Adam Marek
May 16, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Instruction Manual for Swallowing
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as television stations the world over were showing a seemingly endless loop of the second plane piercing the World Trade Center tower, one of the comments repeated with such frequency that it quickly took on the mantle of cliché was, “It looks like something from a movie.” Hollywood had become so sophisticated in its representations of mass chaos, simultaneous with a general disbelief that anything of such magnitude could possibly occur in the real world (at least, the real world of the privileged and technologically superior West), that the initial reaction to the events of that blue September morning amounted to a stark disbelief, a feeling that the images parading across the screen must be fictitious.
The echoes of 9/11 in Adam Marek’s story, about a man named Austin, who discovers he has testicular cancer on the same day that a giant, lizard-like beast attacks his home city, may or may not be coincidental, but the author includes certain elements that invite the comparison. Chief among these is the name of the restaurant where Molly, Austin’s girlfriend, takes refuge in the wake of the monster’s assault. The restaurant is called Osma’s, and it’s difficult to believe that the one-letter separation from the name of the mastermind behind the 9/11 atrocity is unintentional.
Moreover, when Austin, having just been diagnosed, arrives at his sister’s apartment to break the news to her, he finds his sister and their parents gathered around the television, watching what appears to be a cinema verité movie: “He looked at the television again. Why are they watching this stupid programme? The film was done in a real-time docu-drama style. Jerky camera movements, shot on video to make it look like the news. Icons in the corner of the screen. Panicked anchorwoman. Everything.” If the enormity of a gigantic, Godzillaesque creature laying waste to Austin’s city is too difficult to comprehend, it is complicated by a zeitgeist that includes the blurring of the line between fiction and reality in such documentary manqué fare as The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and Rec.
However, Austin’s inability to comprehend the actuality of the circumstances befalling his urban surroundings is also explicable by his utterly understandable absorption in his own diagnosis. How completely does the world contract into a single, malignant aspect in the wake of a medical judgment that sounds like a coarsely delivered death sentence? When Austin leaves his doctor’s office, he is confronted by scenes of disarray, but they fail to register on him, so wrapped up is he in the personally momentous news he has just received:
Outside, the sun was baking the street, melting ice-lollies, making people crazy. Austin watched the pavement as he walked. He was half-aware of people running past him, of screams and exclamations. Two cars collided, and then a third drove into them, but Austin barely noticed. The ground shook again, and he stumbled.
Neither is Austin’s specific diagnosis accidental. He initially ignores the signs of trouble because he is afraid of a positive diagnosis, and because he has recently embarked on a relationship with Molly, and does not want to endanger his sexual potency in the wake of his nascent love affair:
He knew if he went to the doctor, he’d have it chopped off. And he wondered what would happen to his sex drive if he only had one ball, or no balls? What if they had to remove both? So he left it. He would go next week when things weren’t so hectic at work, when he’d been with Molly for a little longer. They’d been together for less than a year. It was too soon to be going to her with things growing on his balls.
When Austin realizes that the images on his sister’s television represent the reality unfolding outside her apartment window, he determines to cross the city and rescue his girlfriend, who is trapped in the area being ravaged by the creature. This act is reckless and intemperate, but it is also a manifestation of the masculine imperative he feels at risk of losing to cancer, even before the illness claims his life. When he eventually reaches the zone of devastation, he appropriates a machine gun from a dead soldier and shoots the lizard – appropriately enough – in the groin.
All of this is presented in the manner of high comedy, burlesquing a kind of Michael Bay–inspired machismo that prizes courage, guts, and balls above all else. But the beating heart of Marek’s story involves a collision between tenuous masculinity and the painful, quivering result of a terrifying and debilitating medical diagnosis. When the ground shakes in the story’s opening sentence, it could be attributable to the marauding lizard – or to something more quotidian, but equally catastrophic.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 15: “The Soother” by Elyse Friedman
May 15, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Long Story Short
Postmodern adulthood can be both wearying and stressful, with pressures impinging from all sides: responsibilities on the family and job front abutting a persistent sense of low self-worth and ennui. It’s little wonder so many of us long for the simple joys of childhood. It’s little wonder some of us long to return to that carefree, antediluvian state.
Elyse Friedman opens “The Soother” with a description of a woman breastfeeding: “Irma unfastened the plastic clip on her nursing bra and brought a hard brown nipple to Lucas’s mouth. He latched on and sucked greedily. She watched his hands curl into fists. ‘There,’ she said, ‘There there …’ ” The kicker is that Irma is a prostitute, and Lucas is a grown man who pays her $200 an hour to treat him like a baby, from diapering him to suckling him to reading him stories from picture books. “His hour with Irma,” we are told, “was the fastest in the week.”
And it’s no surprise, really. Lucas works as a marketer for a tobacco company: not the easiest or most politically correct career choice in the cigarette-averse environment of 21st-century Canada. His children are openly derisive of his job – Leo, his middle child, refuses to allow his father to pay for meals when they go out together, saying he doesn’t “want a dime of Lucas’s ‘dirty cancer money’ ” – but they are absolutely willing to avail themselves of the salary he earns.
Megan, Lucas’s youngest, is pregnant, and sends him on errands for ferrous gluconate (an iron supplement) and mango-vanilla ice cream, then becomes irate when he arrives at her apartment with mango and vanilla and suggests she mix the two together herself. His eldest child, Kate, insists that he negotiate with the management of a local hotel to recoup the money for her upcoming wedding after she pulls out at the last minute because her mother, Lucas’s wife, has come down with a medical condition (possibly psychosomatic) that makes her highly intolerant of the kinds of perfumes and pesticides that are liberally dispersed in public venues. And his brother, Andrew, is trying to get him to invest a not insubstantial amount of money in his latest hare-brained get-rich-quick scheme.
The members of Lucas’s family are all insufferably self-centred and entitled, but he puts up with them willingly, indulging their every whim and demand. His wife’s ailment is the result of her lover committing suicide, “seemingly, because he had written a twelve-hundred-page novel that thirty-seven consecutive editors had declined to publish.” Lucas is aware of his wife’s infidelity because he has had her followed by a private detective. “Not that he wanted to confront his wife,” Friedman writes. “No. He just wanted to know why she was suddenly looking so well and feeling so breezy and at the same time having frequent, guilt-induced nightmares.”
Friedman employs a sharply ironic tone and relies heavily on dialogue to drive her story about a man so severely put-upon that he retreats to the only haven he knows: his nurturing, adoring maternal replacement, Irma. The soother in the title has a number of different connotations: it refers, literally, to the pacifier (or “binky”) that Irma employs with her client; it refers to the prostitute’s function in the life of an otherwise harried and unacknowledged man; and it refers to the dissociation from the pressures and perils of modern life that Lucas’s time with Irma represents. A return to a blissful state in which ungratefulness and hypocrisy are banished, and all that remains is a quiet mobile spinning above him in the air, “the soft music and those blue geese, moving slowly, slowly around the smiling sun.”
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 14: “Bartleby” by Herman Melville
May 14, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
From Billy Budd and Other Stories
For Dani Couture
Although it is now widely considered the greatest American novel ever written, when it was first published in 1851, Moby-Dick was both a critical and commercial failure. The book’s enduring success would likely have astounded its author, who was himself so convinced of its greatness – “It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers,” Melville wrote. “A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it” – that its early failure (the first American edition sold a mere 2,300 copies), combined with that of its successor, Pierre (1852), left him despondent and angry at a reading public that seemed unwilling to engage with his dark and unruly vision of America.
It is important not to put too much emphasis on parallels between an author’s life and his fiction, but certain critics have nevertheless suggested that “Bartleby” is, on one level at least, a response to the poor reaction his novels received. “And so we come to the exhausted Melville of 1852,” writes Frederick Busch in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Billy Budd and Other Stories. “He begins to speak – it is nearly impossible, still, for him to be silent – of what obsesses him: the failure of crucial messages to get through.”
This is not, of course, the only reading of “Bartleby” – it is not even the most convincing. However, to the extent that psychologists have been able to locate in the story’s title character an early example of what has come to be understood as clinical depression, it is a reading that cannot entirely be dismissed. Other, more text-based readings see the story as an exercise in psychological doubling, of the kind frequently employed by Poe (and, indeed, by Melville himself in parts of Moby-Dick); a commentary on the dialectic between free will and determinism; and an examination of the alienating nature of modern life in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. It is a measure of the story’s greatness that it allows for aspects of all these readings.
On its surface, “Bartleby” (the full title is “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”) could not be simpler: the first-person narrator, a New York lawyer, requires the help of a third scrivener, or copyist, to aid in the day-to-day business of his office. His two existing scriveners, nicknamed Turkey and Nippers, are unable to handle the office workload, and are only efficient for opposing parts of the work day (Nippers suffers from indigestion, and is irritable in the mornings; Turkey is an alcoholic, and is drunk after lunch). The narrator hires Bartleby, whose single-minded dedication to his work is initially impressive, but who out of the blue refuses to proofread a document when his employer requests it. The formula Bartleby invokes in his refusal – “I would prefer not to” – becomes a refrain for the character, who gradually ceases to do anything, but also ignores any attempt to have him evicted from the law offices.
“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as passive resistance,” muses the narrator at one point, advancing at least a partial explanation for why he not only puts up with Bartleby’s refusals, but also goes out of his way to understand the man and eventually even offers to take him in at his own home (an offer that is, predictably, met with the polite deferral, “I would prefer not to”). The reason for the narrator’s persistent sufferance of his obstreperous scrivener is one of the story’s abiding questions; in part it can be explained by Bartleby’s diligence in remaining at his post at all hours, regardless of circumstances. “His late remarkable conduct,” the narrator states, “led me to regard his ways narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed, that he never went anywhere. As yet I had never, of my personal knowledge, known him to be outside of my office.” When the new scrivener first arrives, the lawyer erects a screen “which might isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice.” This area of the office, with a small window that looks out on the wall of another building, becomes Bartleby’s lonely “hermitage.”
The scrivener’s physical and social isolation within the office positions him as a kind of avatar for modern ennui, but his active disavowal of the daily workings of the business world indicates a greater degree of agency. The story’s setting is not incidental: imagine what would happen, Melville seems to be suggesting, if someone consciously and determinedly disassociated himself from the entire capitalist mechanism. How would others around him, who have wholeheartedly bought into the money-making endeavour, react to such an iconoclast? For his part, Bartleby’s employer reacts with a kind of bald astonishment; the two other scriveners become irate.
Bartleby, however, effects a not-so-subtle influence on his fellow workers, insinuating his peculiar turn of phrase, almost unwittingly, into their own interactions:
As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly and deferentially approached.
“With submission, sir,” said he, “yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him, and enabling him to assist in examining his papers.”
“So you have got the word, too,” said I, slightly excited.
“With submission, what word, sir,” asked Turkey, respectfully crowding himself into the contracted space behind the screen, and by so doing, making me jostle the scrivener. “What word, sir?”
“I would prefer to be left alone here,” said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.
“That’s the word, Turkey,” said I – “that’s it.”
“Oh, prefer? oh yes – queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer –”
“Turkey,” interrupted I, “you will please withdraw.”
“Oh, certainly, sir, if you prefer that I would.”
This exchange underscores an aspect of the story that many critics avoid talking about: its humour. Critics tend to emphasize Melville’s coldness, and his focus on disaffection and anomie, but “Bartleby” is in many ways an absurdist piece, and the lawyer’s increasing bafflement at his employee’s abject refusals to participate in the day-to-day affairs of the office are fodder for some not insubstantial laughs.
This is not to deny the essential sadness at the story’s centre, a sadness born of the inimical nature of the modern world. It is notable that Bartleby is literally a figure without a history: nothing is know of him in the story – not his past, not his family – save one telling detail the narrator divulges at the very end. Before being hired on as a scrivener at the narrator’s law office, Bartleby worked in the Dead Letter Office of the U.S. Postal Service, a place where, in Melville’s conception, all hope for communication dies. “Sometimes from out the folded paper,” the narrator thinks, “the pale clerk takes a ring – the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity – he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life these letters speed to death.” Here we are reminded of Busch’s assertion that the story is about an author who felt he was finally unable to get his meaning across to a recalcitrant public. The final words of the story – “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” – are an anguished cri de couer to a world that wants to hear nothing of it.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 13: “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” by Etgar Keret
May 13, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (Nathan Englander, trans.)
“There is something about Jewish writing that’s very reflective,” says Etgar Keret, “while Israeli writing is more active and epic in nature.” Although Keret’s fiction is generally active – and could never be mistaken for the work of, say, Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick – the adjective “epic” appears counterintuitive: a typical Keret story runs only a few pages, and usually deals with one or two characters in a specific moment or situation. But, if his approach lacks a certain grandiosity, it is also the case that he traffics in major themes: life, death, war and peace, the nature of human existence.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Keret’s writing is remarkable for its apolitical nature; he refuses to proselytize, preferring to come at complicated sociopolitical issues from a position based in humanism and a striking empathy for the painful realities that attend to the business of being alive. (All of which makes Keret’s writing sound tortured and unwelcoming: it is important to emphasize how funny his fiction is.) What is most impressive, however (and most worthy of the “epic” appellation), is the author’s ability to infuse his remarkably brief stories with a staggering amount of emotion and resonance.
“What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” begins with Yonatan, an Israeli filmmaker who comes up with “a brilliant idea for a documentary.” Camera in hand, he will go door to door, beginning in his Tel Aviv suburb and branching out to other areas in Israel, and ask people one question: “If you found a talking goldfish that granted you three wishes, what would you wish for?” He will film each subject providing answers, then sell this footage to a local television station. With enough material, he thinks, he might end up with “a poignant piece of social commentary, a testament to the massive rift between our dreams and the often compromised reality in which we live.”
The people he visits enumerate all kinds of wishes: an old spinster lady wishes for a child; others wish for money or health or youth; a Holocaust survivor wishes “for all the Nazis left living in the world to be held accountable for their crimes.” But Yonatan has one specific desire: he wants to find one Arab living in Israel who would wish for peace.
Eventually, Yonatan arrives at the apartment of a Russian named Sergei Goralick, an expat living in Jaffa. Sergei is not fluent in Hebrew, and mistakenly thinks that Yonatan wants to steal his goldfish. In a frenzy, Sergei hits Yonatan over the head with the burner off his stove, killing him.
At this point, it is important to note several things. First, Keret does not go out of his way to make the political elements of his story explicit, but anyone with a cursory knowledge of Middle Eastern politics should be aware of how charged the situation he has set up is. Russia is an ally of several Arab states that pose a direct threat to Israel’s existence, and Sergei is old enough to remember the intimidating nature a knock on the door from the KGB could constitute. When confronted with a stranger intent on filming him, and speaking a language he remains uneasy with, it is not entirely surprising that Sergei should panic and react in an unfortunately violent manner.
On a technical level, it is also appropriate to note the bait-and-switch that Keret pulls approximately one third of the way into his story: all of a sudden, the perspective shifts from the filmmaker Yonatan to his putative subject. This is significant because it also represents a shift in genre, from naturalism to the kind of magic realism that Keret is perhaps most famous for.
Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Alana Newhouse says, “Keret is a cynic who can’t manage to shake off his hopefulness,” and her assessment seems particularly well suited to this story. Sergei acts in a manner that is arguably self-interested, but in doing so, he also commits an act of self-sacrifice that offers hope for a kind of reconciliation among the conflicting elements of Israeli society. By refusing to betray his essential nature, Sergei tacitly acknowledges the essential human imperative that insists we care for one another, even if it means denying ourselves in the process.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 12: “Promise” by Daniel Griffin
May 12, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Stopping for Strangers
“For a while I’d wanted to write a story with a gun in it,” writes Daniel Griffin about the opening story in his debut collection. “I’d been thinking about that Chekhov line about when a gun is introduced in act one, ‘it must, without fail discharge before the end of act five.’ ” The gun in “Promise” does not, in fact, go off, but this does not mean that the story is devoid of violence, or of the kind of dramatic climax Chekhov insisted upon in his maxim.
“Promise” is about the limits of brotherly love. The first-person narrator, Doug, makes a rare visit to his brother, Marshall, at the behest of their mother, who is worried about Marshall’s mental state after his partner walks out on him. When Doug and his daughter, Tracy, arrive at Marshall’s house, they discover him attending to a disassembled pistol on a towel in his living room. The pistol is their father’s old Luger, which Marshall claims he is simply cleaning. Doug is worried because his mother has mentioned the gun, and the fact that Marshall’s estranged partner, Susan, has a restraining order out against him. After paying a visit to Susan, who appears at the door of her mother’s house sporting a black eye, Doug returns to his brother’s home and removes the hammer from the gun parts scattered around his brother’s living room. This well-intentioned act, however, is insufficient to prevent Marshall from meting out violent retribution on Susan for abandoning him.
Griffin employs a spare prose style, and writes in the manner of what has become known as kitchen-sink realism. The story is short – clocking in at under ten pages – but packs an emotional wallop thanks to the careful attention to detail the author deploys right from the jump.
“Promise” is infused with a sense of starkness and unease. When Doug and his daughter first arrive at Marshall’s home, the driveway is empty and one of the first things Doug notices is “a constellation of rust spots at the centre of [the] door.” There is of course the gun, which is situated in the living room; Doug sends Tracy to play with her toys in the dining room, and we are told that when the brothers were young, they referred to that particular space as the “dying room.” The ironic juxtaposition of the living room (complete with the disassembled Luger) and the so-called “dying” room helps underscore the feeling of distress that Griffin builds throughout his brief narrative. So too does the sound of sirens signalling a fire in a house down the street. Marshall thinks that the fire heralds a purgative element for the neighbourhood: “It’s about time someone cleaned that place out. Fucking crack house. Whole area is going to shit.” His brother, on the other hand, is much less sanguine about the atmosphere surrounding Marshall, particularly after Marshall gets into a fight with one of his neighbours.
The title of the story refers to the bond forged by the brothers as children, when they formed a gang of two and entered into “an oath of loyalty.” The oath involves the well-known ritual of cutting their fingers and mingling their blood to symbolize an eternal, unbreakable bond. The fact that becoming blood brothers involves an instance of ceremonial violence is not incidental, and uncomfortably prefigures Marshall’s final act of aggression toward Susan. Doug tries to protect Marshall from himself by removing the Luger’s hammer, but this proves a futile gesture, and the story’s final, unsettling lines recall the cutting the brothers engaged in to form their special bond as children: “As far as I know, he never tried to reassemble the Luger. And in the end it didn’t matter. In the end, he used a knife.”
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 11: “An Apology” by Ramona Dearing
May 11, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Hard Ol’ Spot: An Anthology of Atlantic Canadian Fiction (Mike Heffernan, ed.)
For natives of Newfoundland and Labrador, the shocking revelations of physical and sexual abuse at the Mount Cashel Orphanage remain something of an open wound. In 1989, fourteen years after the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s investigation into reports of abuse by the Christian Brothers who ran the orphanage was shut down by officials in the provincial government, a raft of explosive media reports prompted the RNC to re-open the case. Fourteen people – including nine Christian Brothers and five members of the laity – were eventually charged with eighty-eight counts of abuse dating back to the 1950s. This history swirls in the background of Linden McIntyre’s Scotiabank Giller Prize winning novel, The Bishop’s Man, and takes centre stage in Ramona Dearing’s story, “An Apology.”
Dearing never mentions Mount Cashel by name. Her story is about an ex-brother named Gerard Lundrigan, who in his twenties was on staff at an orphanage in St. John’s. Now sixty-four, Gerard has relocated to the Ontario city of Stratford, where he lives alone with his dog, Brigus. As the story opens, Gerard has returned to St. John’s to stand trial on eleven counts of sexual abuse brought by former residents of the orphanage where he worked.
This is difficult and heavy subject matter, but Dearing ratchets up the stakes by electing to tell the story from Gerard’s perspective. As a result, none of the information we receive is factual or verifiable; it is up to us as readers to filter out Gerard’s prevarications and rationalizations in an attempt to get closer to some sort of objective truth. Dearing includes notes the ex-brother keeps during the witness testimony (“The disgusting thing you allude to – where would I have gotten the idea? What about my vows? Why would I do such a thing?”), his assessment of several of the complainants against him (“The next witness is a real crowd-pleaser. Makes the jury smile as he remembers stringing chestnuts to play conkers”), and his own self-justifications for past actions.
Dearing proves masterful at manipulating her reader’s emotions. The relative placidity of the story’s opening, which involves Gerard arriving in court for the first day of his trial, is shattered on the second page, when Gerard listens to the Crown counsel make his opening remarks to the jury: “You are the judge of the facts and as such, you will hear direct testimony that Brother Lundrigan beat little boys. Sodomized little boys. Ejaculated in their mouths as they gagged and struggled.” In addition to the harshness of the description here, there is the subtle authorial manipulation of point-of-view: the jury may hear “direct testimony” from Gerard’s accusers, but readers have only Gerard’s perspective to work from.
The author does include certain story elements that help situate us. When Gerard arrives in court, he is carrying a book. The book is Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, about an alcoholic priest on the run from authorities in Mexico. Greene’s “whiskey priest” is hardly an example of spotless rectitude, but his moral transgressions pale by comparison to the crimes Gerard stands accused of. As he listens to the testimony against him, Gerard formulates responses in his head. When one witness complains of being strapped, Gerard writes in his notes, “Blame the era, not the man.” Later on, he muses that the brothers at the orphanage engaged in corporal punishment as a means of instilling discipline and character in their young charges: “We wanted those boys to have a chance in the world. We pushed them. We made it clear everything was going to be hard for them. We didn’t believe in pretending they weren’t orphans.” When Gerard takes the stand in his own defence, he admits to kissing one boy on the mouth (the echoes of Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane are surely not accidental), and denies he ever knew one witness at all.
Particularly alarming is the tenderness with which Gerard refers to his dog, Brigus, and the amount of time he spends worrying about its welfare. This is juxtaposed with his craven dismissal of the people who have come to court to accuse him of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, most of whom he dismisses as drunks or reprobates:
Gerard is thankful for his lawyer, who establishes in one efficient afternoon of cross-examination that the complainant has a long criminal record, including theft. He’d also attacked a man in a bar with a broken bottle. That’s the kind of low-life he is. In and out of mental hospitals, with children spat out across northern Ontario like bits of gristle, and ex-wives lining up to get restraining orders.
It apparently never occurs to Gerard to ask himself what formative experiences in that man’s childhood might have led him to such an unfortunate set of circumstances later in life. That Gerard seems to feel so much more empathy and concern for a dog than for the human beings on the stand is one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him.
What is likely to make readers most uncomfortable about “An Apology” is Dearing’s refusal to render judgment. The story ends before the jury returns its verdict, in effect putting readers in the position of determining the man’s guilt or innocence. As Kathleen Winter points out in the foreword to the anthology in which this story appears, “An Apology” “is at heart a story about judgment, [but] it does not itself judge.” It leaves that up to us. Ultimately, we are the ones sitting in judgment over Gerard’s actions. And that is indeed a hard ol’ spot to be.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 10: “One Year in Paradise” by Natalya Klyuchareva
May 10, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, eds.; Mariya Gusev, trans.)
Natalya Klyuchareva was born in 1981, which places her squarely in the first generation of Russians to come of age after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika had been in place since the mid-1980s, the Russia that many of its young writers observe is not a place of openness or restructuring. On the contrary, Russia’s young artists – often the canaries in any sociopolitical coalmine – frequently attest to a nation of dissolution, civil war, and institutional corruption. As Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker write in the foreword to the extraordinary anthology Rasskazy (the word literally means “stories”):
The developments in Russia’s political sphere during this time and under Vladimir Putin’s rule – total consolidation of power in the Kremlin’s hands, airtight censorship in the electronic media, the wholesale institutionalization of corruption, the all-out ascendance of former KGB personnel (especially the Leningrad KGB) to prominent posts throughout the government, the near silencing of political opposition, the open fomenting of overtly xenophobic and nationalistic sentiment in a society still traumatized by the grand geopolitical defeat and subsequent disintegration of the once-indestructible Soviet Union (“Russia is rising from her knees”), even the restoration of the Soviet National Anthem – have in many ways turned back the hands of Russia’s sociopolitical clock.
Klyuchareva’s story, which won both the Yuri Kazakov award and the Eureka prize, is not explicitly political, but on at least one level, it is all about the decrepit nature of the Russian nation. After his wife runs out on him, the story’s unnamed narrator flees his Moscow home for the woods outside of Smolensk, where his grandfather disappeared – and is presumed to have died – during the Second World War. In the course of his peregrinations, the narrator stumbles upon a village called Paradise, where one of the eccentric locals convinces him to purchase an empty cottage for 800 rubles. The balance of the story describes the narrator’s experience living in Paradise over the course of one year, during which time he befriends a pair of sisters, named Toma and Lucia, and a misanthropic woman known only as Auntie Montie, who is unfriendly to everybody except her pet goat.
Although the story focuses very specifically on the personal travails of an individual man, “One Year in Paradise” is never far removed from the subject of war. It opens on May 9, which is Victory Day in Russia – the anniversary of the Russian defeat of Nazi Germany. As the story begins, the narrator is going to borrow a television from his neighbour, because his tradition is to watch war movies on May 9. These movies – “naïve, full of pathos, sentimental, full of propaganda” – help to satiate the narrator’s “thirst for the real,” and also help him to put his own troubles into perspective: “In front of these kids (younger than me) who went to their deaths with no faith in their future lives, with only the hope that their grandchildren would be happy, I’m ashamed of the unhappiness I feel because of things that are, in essence, unimportant.”
The narrator’s fascination with war arises from his dismay at not knowing the truth about what befell his grandfather; his only knowledge of the older man comes from stories passed down by his family members. This preoccupation has more to do with his own sense of personal history than with the history of his country or its military escapades, and stands in opposition to his estranged wife’s outburst during one May 9 television marathon: ” ‘If you like all of this military trash, you should sign up for some contract work in the army!’ She believed I was nostalgic for gunfire, trench fleas, and hand-to-hand combat.”
Out walking in the woods one day, the narrator comes across a soldier’s helmet with two bullet holes in it. Although he doubts it belonged to his grandfather – “coincidences like these just cannot exist” – he buries the helmet in an open graveyard. When he returns to the gravesite the following day, he is startled to discover a large wooden cross has been mounted there. The sisters tell him that the cross was placed there by a mute carpenter who lives in the area. “He sells coffins,” one of the sisters says. “And the crosses – he has this quirk, likes to put them everywhere. Who knows why?”
If the carpenter’s motivation is obscure to Toma and Lucia, in the context of the story the iconography of death refers in a larger sense to the state of Russia in the post-Soviet era. The glorious victory commemorated by the May 9 celebrations have long since given way to civil war and the corruption and decay reflected in what the narrator witnesses when he walks around the city of Smolensk: “Kremlin and poured-concrete Kruschev-era apartments, same as everywhere.” If there were any doubt about the nature of the country at the time the story takes place, it is clarified by the map of the Russian Federation the narrator discovers on the wall of the cottage he purchases. The map is worn and tattered, and over the course of the year, pieces fall from it like leaves from a tree. As the editors point out in their foreword, “Even Paradise is a place where Russia falls short of its promise.”
This notion reaches its apogee following the death of Auntie Montie, when the narrator discovers a coffin in a shed behind her house. The coffin is covered in cobwebs, indicating that it has been there for some time. The coffin waiting for a body to inhabit it is a clear symbol for the country as a whole. The narrator’s discovery of the coffin bleeds into the story’s final tableau, which occurs after he returns to his own home to find the map of the country falling off the wall. As darkness falls, the narrator is left smoking a cigarette and supporting the map with his hands, “holding up the motherland.” Would that it were that simple, Klyuchareva’s narrative implies.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 9: “Residents and Transients” by Bobbie Ann Mason
May 9, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From Shiloh and Other Stories
“Since my husband went away to work in Louisville, I have, to my surprise, taken a lover.” From its very first line, Bobbie Ann Mason’s story announces its central conflict, a tension between constancy and change, movement and stasis. It is not just that the narrator’s husband has left home to pursue his career as a salesman of word processors (a nascent technology in 1982, when Mason’s first collection was published). The affair that Mary, the story’s narrator, embarks upon, is at once a mechanism for potential change, while at the same time holding out the promise of continuance.
Mary is a child of rural Kentucky, and has returned to live in her parents’ home after eight years away. Her ailing parents have fled to Florida, and her husband, Stephen, spends his time away from work scouting homes for them in Louisville. “I came back to Kentucky three years ago because my parents were in poor health,” Mary thinks. “Now they have moved to Florida, but I have stayed here, wondering why I ever went away.” Stephen, by contrast, feels that Mary’s attachment is “so provincial.” “People live all their lives in one place,” Mary counters. “What’s wrong with that?”
Mason, herself a native of Kentucky, writes fiction steeped in a sense of place, but in “Residents and Transients” this is problematized by an evolving social milieu and a central character who is unsure of where she fits in the grand scheme of things.
Mary’s husband is “a Yankee,” although she avers that she would not refer to him as such. However, she recognizes him as a Northerner of the kind that is “moving into this region with increasing frequency, a fact which disturbs the native residents.” Mary finds this encroachment discomfiting, altering as it does the familiar contours of her childhood home, a place that has changed noticeably in the eight years she has spent pursuing higher education elsewhere:
I’m very much an outsider myself, though I’ve tried to fit in since I’ve been back. I only say this because I overhear the skeptical and desperate remarks, as though the town were being invaded. The schoolchildren are saying “you guys” now and smoking dope. I can imagine a classroom of bashful country hicks, listening to some new kid blithely talking in a Northern brogue about his year in Europe. Such influences are making people jittery.
Mary is a child of the land, but she sees the land changing all around her; the place she returns to after her studies is at once the same as the place she left and utterly unrecognizable.
Still, her parents’ house and its surroundings provide her the kind of comfort she can’t conceive of finding for herself in the big city of Louisville. “I can’t imagine living on a street again,” she tells Stephen, with derisory emphasis on the urban-inflected word “street.” She prefers the “stateliness” of her old homestead, “the way it rises up from the fields like a patch of mutant jimsonweeds.”
If she identifies in Stephen an essential otherness, a desire to be apart from the rural environment she has retreated to, her new lover, Larry, himself a lifelong resident of the area, offers the promise of stability, if not adventure or excitement. (Their first exchanged words – ” ‘Hot enough for you?’ or something like that” – could not be more banal or uninspiring.) Larry is the picture of steadfastness – he is a professional (a dentist), and lives in “a modern brick home in a good section of town, five doors down from a U.S. congressman.” He offers Mary what Stephen can’t: a connection to the past; steadiness; stability.
Mary’s ontological dilemma is encapsulated in a story she tells Larry about two classes of cats – residents and transients. The residents remain on their home turf, while the transients are nomads and wanderers. Conventional wisdom has it that the resident cats are the dominant strain, whereas the transients are “the bums, the losers.” But, Mary says, some scientists think that “the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence.” For her own part, Mary is caught somewhere between these two states, unable to decide which will most satisfy her. This indecision constitutes a strange kind of paralysis: though she feels an attachment to her home, she misses her husband and wonders about the virtues of movement. Mason’s story is replete with images of people and things that have changed location or moved on, from nomadic natives who abandon a place “when they used up the soil, or the garbage got too high” to cows that once roamed around the homestead and now remain “like ghosts” in Mary’s mind.
The final stages of the story are provisional: there is no complete resolution of the tension Mary feels between moving and staying put. The closing image involves a cat with different-coloured eyes. In the glow of the porch lamp, the cat’s eyes appear red and green, like stoplights, and Mary is presented “waiting for the light to change.” The tension and unresolved contradictions of everything that has gone before are contained in that single contingent, tentative gerund.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 8: “Manning” by Andrew Hood
May 8, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From The Cloaca
There are two epigraphs to Andrew Hood’s second collection of short fiction. The first, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Crack-Up,” is about “the process of breaking down” that constitutes life, “the blows that do the dramatic side of the work.” Sometimes, Fitzgerald posits, these blows come from without and are noticeable and dramatic. Other times, they are less noticeable and come from inside us. It is the latter kind, Fitzgerald implies, that have the greatest effect – and do the most damage.
Hood’s second epigraph is from the Adam Sandler movie Billy Madison: “He called the shit poop!”
The juxtaposition is instructive. Hood’s stories constantly shuttle between the sublime and the ridiculous, high culture and low. In one breath he can quote Schopenhauer on the nature of suicide (“It will generally be found that where the terrors of life come to outweigh the terrors of death a man will put an end to his life”), and in the next, apply that philosophy to the life and death of teenybopper actor Jonathan Brandis.
In addition, the excremental focus of the second epigraph is appropriate, since faeces – both literal and otherwise – is a recurring motif in Hood’s fiction. The protagonist of “Manning,” a nine-year-old boy identified only by his mother’s cloying pet name for him – Pickle – observes at one point, “I get the feeling that in life you’re rarely lucky enough to know just where the shit has come from that gets cut up and thrown by the blades of your fan.” The incident at the centre of Hood’s story is one of those rare instances, precipitated by the attempted sale of a collection of sports cards that Pickle’s mother absurdly believes should be worth a great deal of money.
This belief arises from the fact that before he “hit the road like it hit him first,” Pickle’s mother’s boyfriend, Sean (who may or may not be Pickle’s father), became entranced by the story of a factory co-worker who apparently sold his collection of baseball cards for $1 million. “I heard about him all the time,” Pickle says, “because fucking Ben Rooney became this big hero for Sean. And that’s the source of this huge load of elephant dook that got chucked at my fan and sprayed pretty much over everything.”
The bulk of Hood’s story takes place at an anonymous arena in the town of Corbet, Ontario, where the local OHL team plays. The arena doesn’t have a name, just a blank space on its facade where a name would appear. Someone had taken it upon him or (less likely) herself to spray paint a giant green penis on the arena’s front face, so it has come to be known locally as the Big Green Dick Arena. On the last Sunday of each month, Pickle and his mother set up a folding card table at a bazaar where they attempt to unload Sean’s worthless collection of sports cards. (Pickle’s mother had previously tried to sell the collection to a local dealer, but stormed out in a huff when he offered her only $300: “How dare Rudy try to take advantage of a destitute and heartbroken widow who was selling her beloved husband’s beloved collection to take care of her ailing, beloved son, who had contracted AIDS – that’s right! Goddamned, fucking AIDS, Rudy! – from the blood transfusion he needed after the car crash that had killed her beloved husband?”)
During a stint manning the table at the arena (one of the several connotations implied by the story’s title), Pickle is accosted by a prospective buyer who is interested in a baseball card featuring an unimportant Seattle player. The buyer, who Pickle dubs “the pile,” wants the card to fill out his collection, and offers Pickle five dollars for it.
Pickle’s hesitation, and everything that follows from it, provides the story’s title with a second level of implication. Effectively, the boy has an epiphanic realization about the nature of achievement, and what the individual moment captured on the face of the card might mean in the life of a player whose career was brief and undistinguished. This realization is profound, especially for a nine-year-old boy, and he is so moved by it that he refuses to sell the card, precipitating a comic stand-off with the pile. In refusing to give in and sell the card, in standing his ground for something he believes in, Pickle is doing what has become known as “manning up”: he is participating in an essential moment in his transformation from boyhood to something else.
Hood is adept at grotesque characterizations, and the pile is a case in point. He is portrayed as wearing a NASA fanny pack (“I’m thinking about an astronaut, done up in all his expensive hubbub, wearing one of those crappy fanny packs”), sporting a moustache that looks like a “lip beard,” and with one claw-like hand that ends in stubby little fingers, which Pickle likens to “baby penises.” Hood is merciless in his depiction of this odious character: at one point “angry toots of breath fart out of his dilated nostrils,” and at another, he sputters in a way that reminds Pickle of “shit being pulled on one of those machines like taffy.” But the grotesqueness also masks a kind of sadly pathetic aspect, a loneliness that attends to being an outcast. Pickle is a perspicacious nine-year-old, and he precisely articulates the specific malaise that people like the pile suffer:
These men that crowd The Arena are basically boys, guarding the crap they have and conniving to steal the crap they want. Action figures and toy cars that they never got to have when they were the right age, memorabilia of athletes that did stuff these men in a million years would never be able to do, comic books wrapped tight in their Mylar bags, never to be opened again.
Pickle’s understanding, and his almost preternatural ability to separate the achievement of even a failed athlete from the meanness that has overtaken the pile, allows him to make a small stand, which is in fact a large step along the road to becoming a man. The incident in “Manning” is an example of what Fitzgerald was referring to when he wrote about the sort of blow that comes from within, one “that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it,” but that leaves you fundamentally changed. The poop jokes are just the icing on the cake.
31 Days of Stories 2012, Day 7: “Green Jerseys” by Derek Hayes
May 7, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
From The Maladjusted
Like Heather Birrell’s “Frogs,” “Green Jerseys” takes place in a high school, and focuses on one of the teaching staff. In this case, the protagonist is Gus Petropolous, a fifty-year-old Greek immigrant who works as a special-needs assistant to a pair of students, Bobby Fenner and Simon Winters. Whereas Birrell employs a third-person narration to inject her story with a certain equanimity, Hayes tells his story in the first person, from the perspective of Gus, a fiercely proud man who has only been in Canada five years and still speaks in broken English, but who insists that “even though I don’t say much and even though I pronounce things incorrectly, there’s an acute consciousness on this side of my thick eyebrows.” In addition to his the sense of dignity that underpins his self-worth, Gus adheres to traditional values, including the need for strict discipline and respect for authority. He looks down on Stan Wakefield, the teacher he’s been assigned to assist, because, Gus thinks, Mr. Wakefield “doesn’t have authority.”
The story takes place over one week at the end of term in June. In Gus’s own estimation, “It hasn’t been a great year.” Gus feels slighted by the teachers in the staff room, whom he believes (correctly) to be making fun of him, and thinks that Mr. Wakefield allows his students too much latitude in their behaviour and their attention to their schoolwork. During the week of the story, Gus decides to take things into his own hands and embarks on a mini-revolt against the teacher.
In the first instance, he barricades the classroom door after the final bell goes off, refusing to let anyone leave until all of the students have completed their work assignments. This despite at least one student who needs to catch a train to the suburbs to meet her father, and will miss the train if she stays late. The conversation between Gus and Mr. Wakefield is a comic debasement of a dialogue between a hostage-taker and a negotiator:
“Tanya needs to get on the 3:45 GO Train to see her dad in Mississauga. She can’t miss this train. Do you think we could let her out into the world? Maybe negotiate everyone else’s release after?” Mr. Wakefield says this with such concern for Tanya that my Mediterranean heart warms to him. Tanya is standing beside both of us now, tears streaking her mascara.
“I’ll let her out, Mr. Wakefield, on one condition,” I say.
Tanya’s face breaks out into a smile.
“What’s that, Gus?” he says.
“She does her assignment.”
Later in the week, Gus hijacks a lecture Mr. Wakefield is giving on the Second World War, because he feels the teacher is not putting sufficient emphasis on the Greek contribution to the defeat of the Nazis, focusing instead on the conscription of Canadian soldiers. “The Germans also met fierce Greek resistance on the island of Crete,” Gus tells the somewhat baffled students. “German paratroopers suffered almost seven thousand casualties.” Gus goes on until the bell rings, at which point he bemoans the fact that the students had not paid more attention to his “stirring lecture.” “Next time you should take some notes,” he tells them.
To some extent, Mr. Wakefield is the author of his own misfortune. At the beginning of the year, Gus tells us, Mr. Wakefield took the older man aside and said, “I don’t believe in labels. As far as I’m concerned we’re both teachers. There’s no hierarchy here.” This is a considerate gesture on the part of the teacher toward his new assistant, but of course it is not at all true. Inside the classroom, there is a definite hierarchy, and Gus is not at the top of it. What Mr. Wakefield could not have anticipated is that Gus would take him at his literal word.
Hayes uses the story’s first-person perspective to underline the distance between Gus’s perception of the other characters and what is evident reality. “Mr. Wakefield is a stand-up guy,” Gus thinks after the ad hoc hostage-taking. “During the entire standoff at the door, he had my back. He went from desk to desk, controlling the kids one by one while I protected the front.”
The disparity between Gus’s obliviousness and the truth provides the story with its emotional force; right up to the very final scene, Gus is unable to comprehend the way other people see him, nor is he able to respond to anyone on a level that is not absolutely literal. After the school principal finagles an opportunity to send Gus away to teacher’s college as an alternative to firing him, the staff throws a going-away party, for which they all don the green jerseys of the Greek football team that Gus follows. “They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they didn’t like me,” Gus thinks. His complete lack of comprehension provides the closing moments of this otherwise comic story with a note of poignant melancholy.