Tag: Microfiction

“Marmosets,” a very short story by Clarice Lispector

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“Marmosets”

by

Clarice Lispector

translated by Elizabeth Bishop

The first time we had a marmoset was just before New Year’s. We were without water and without a maid, people were lining up to buy meat, the hot weather had suddenly begun—when, dumfounded, I saw the present enter the house, already eating a banana, examining everything with great rapidity, and with a long tail. It looked like a monkey not yet grown; its potentialities were tremendous. It climbed up the drying clothes to the clothesline, where it swore like a sailor, and the banana-peelings fell where they would. I was exhausted already. Every time I forgot and absentmindedly went out on the back terrace, I gave a start: there was that happy man. My younger son knew, before I did, that I would get rid of this gorilla: “If I promise that sometime the monkey will get sick and die, will you let him stay? Or if you knew that sometime he’d fall out the window, somehow, and die down there?” My feelings would glance aside. The filthiness and blithe unconsciousness of the little monkey made me responsible for his fate, since he himself would not take any blame. A friend understood how bitterly I had resigned myself, what dark deeds were being nourished beneath my dreaminess, and rudely saved me: a delighted gang of little boys appeared from the hill and carried off the laughing man. The new year was devitalized but at least monkey-less.

A year later, at a time of happiness, suddenly there in Copacabana I saw the small crowd. I thought of my children, the joys they gave me, free, unconnected with the worries they also gave me, free, and I thought of a chain of joy: “Will the person receiving this pass it along to someone else,” one to another, like a spark along a train of powder. Then and there I bought the one who would be called Lisette.

She could almost fit in one hand. She was wearing a skirt, and earrings, necklace, and bracelet of glass beads. The air of an immigrant just disembarking in her native costume. Like an immigrant’s, too, her round eyes.

This one was a woman in miniature. She lived with us three days. She had such delicate bones. She was of such a sweetness. More than her eyes, her look was rounded. With every movement, the earrings shook; the skirt was always neat, the red necklace glinted. She slept a lot, but, as to eating, she was discreet and languid. Her rare caress was only a light bite that left no mark.

On the third day we were out on the back terrace admiring Lisette and the way she was ours. “A little too gentle,” I thought, missing the gorilla. And suddenly my heart said harshly: “But this isn’t sweetness. This is death.” The dryness of the message left me calm. I said to the children: “Lisette is dying.” Looking at her, I realized the stage of love we had already reached. I rolled her up in a napkin and went with the children to the nearest first-aid station, where the doctor couldn’t attend to her because he was performing an emergency operation on a dog. Another taxi—”Lisette thinks she’s out for a drive, mama”—another hospital. There they gave her oxygen.

And with the breath of life, a Lisette we hadn’t known was revealed. The eyes less round, more secretive, more laughing, and in the prognathous and ordinary face a certain ironic haughtiness. A little more oxygen and she wanted to speak so badly she couldn’t bear being a monkey; she was, and she would have had much to tell. More oxygen, and then an injection of salt solution; she reacted to the prick with an angry slap, her bracelet glittering. The male nurse smiled: “Lisette! Gently, my dear!”

The diagnosis: she wouldn’t live unless there was oxygen at hand, and even then it was unlikely. “Don’t buy monkeys in the street,” he scolded me; “sometimes they’re already sick.” No, one must buy dependable monkeys, and know where they came from, to ensure at least five years of love, and know what they had or hadn’t done, like getting married. I discussed it with the children a minute. Then I said to the nurse: “You seem to like Lisette very much. So if you let her stay a few days, near the oxygen, you can have her.” He was thinking. “Lisette is pretty!” I implored.

“She’s beautiful!” he agreed, thoughtfully. Then he sighed and said, “If I cure Lisette, she’s yours.” We went away with our empty napkin.

The next day they telephoned, and I informed the children that Lisette had died. The younger one asked me, “Do you think she died wearing her earrings?” I said yes. A week later the older one told me, “You look so much like Lisette!”

I replied, “I like you, too.”

“Ordinary Nudes,” a very short story by Stuart Dybek

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“Ordinary Nudes”

by

Stuart Dybek

  She stands before the full-length mirror that’s framed by the bedroom door, observing how her nipples, navel, and the delta of copper hair, which has grown back at the confluence of her thighs, shimmer in the dusky light. Her reflection dimples and ripples like the surface of a pond where fish rise to feed on a mayfly hatch. Imagine his wonder when in the years to come he’ll realize that she was not to be confused with ordinary nudes—not some nymph frolicking along the shore, or goddess ascending from sea foam, or ballerina poised to wade into her morning bath. Those photographs she let him take, kept in a drawer, beneath his underwear as if hidden in the depths, will age as she does.

“The Darlette” — Henri Michaux

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“The Darlette”

by

Henri Michaux

translated by Richard Ellmann

The Darelette is found in dry and sandy terrain. It is not a plant but an agile beast, corseted and boned unlike any insect, fat as a rat and long as one, if the tail is included.

If a man jumps on her last segment (there are three), it may well break if the animal has not arrived at adult age.

Since the inside, under walls as thick as a little finger, does not contain any essential organs, the wounded beast continues her walk with her abdomen pounded to jelly and her walls breached. She is a beast who fears no one, eats snakes, and goes to suck the udders of cows which do not dare move.

The ditch spider makes war on her successfully; it winds around her, overwhelms her with threads; as soon as she is paralyzed, it pumps her out completely through the ears.

Her rosy ears and her eyes and her internal organs are the only tender parts of her body.

It pumps her out completely through the ears.

“In the Woods,” a very short story by Ron Loewinsohn

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“In the Woods” by Ron Loewinsohn
The woodsman plods up the hill with his axe on his shoulder. He works for a lumber company and never sees the man who signs his checks, but his knowledge of the trees he euts down is their smells in the air become suddenly dusty around him, the squirrels and small birds who live in their branches, the squeak his axe makes as he pulls it out of the tree, the feel of his shoulders and arms as he swings, with his feet planted firmly and widely. This morning he saw the lovers lying on a bed of moss in the clearing behind him, but he didn’t stop. They were fully clothed and as they slept he saw the naked sward between them rusted to a sliver. They have been there forever, he knew, tho he’d never seen them before, with the light coming down thru the branches playing on them there as if they slept at the bottom of a lake. He will think of them once or twice as he climbs into the truck with the others, or just before he lifts a french fry to his mouth. Then someone will speak to him and he’ll answer with his mouth full, while we are haunted by the image, the two bodies filled with repose like a lake in the mountains. The two young people with perfect features fill our dreams, fill them to overflowing, even before we reach sleep, plodding toward it, shaking our heads on the pillow, reaching out to the watch, running our fingers thru our hair again, and hearing in the darkness the sound of our swallowing. And they the two lovers asleep on the mossy bank—what do they dream of? They dream of us. Their dreams are haunted by us straining our eyes in the dim light, our stomachs knotted with anxiety, spilling the drink and wiping it up, sweating and reaching for the branch, feeling the bark and smelling the sap, wanting each other in the empty room and letting our face fall into our hands, aching and hanging on. They dream of the woodsman, the actual woodsman and the dust be raises.  

“Wife in Reverse,” a very short story by Stephen Dixon

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“Wife in Reverse”

by

Stephen Dixon

 His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open. He knocks on his younger daughter’s bedroom door and says “You better come. Mom seems to be expiring.” His wife slips into a coma three days after she comes home and stays in it for eleven days. They have a little party second day she’s home: Nova Scotia salmon, chocolates, a risotto he made, brie cheese, strawberries, champagne. An ambulette brings his wife home. She says to him “Wheel me around the garden before I go to bed for the last time.” His wife refuses the feeding tube the doctors want to put in her and insists she wants to die at home. She says “I don’t want any more life support, medicines, fluid or food.” He calls 911 for the fourth time in two years and tells the dispatcher “My wife; I’m sure she has pneumonia again.” His wife has a trach put in. “When will it come out?” she says, and the doctor says “To be honest? Never.” “Your wife has a very bad case of pneumonia,” the doctor in ICU tells him and his daughters the first time, “and has a one to two percent chance of surviving.” His wife now uses a wheelchair. His wife now uses a motor cart. His wife now uses a walker with wheels. His wife now uses a walker. His wife has to use a cane. His wife’s diagnosed with MS. His wife has trouble walking. His wife gives birth to their second daughter. “This time you didn’t cry,” she says, and he says “I’m just as happy, though.” His wife says to him “Something seems wrong with my eyes.” His wife gives birth to their daughter. The obstetrician says “I’ve never seen a father cry in the birthing room.” The rabbi pronounces them husband and wife, and just before he kisses her, he bursts out crying. “Let’s get married,” he says to her, and she says “It’s all right with me,” and he says “It is?” and starts crying. “What a reaction,” she says, and he says “I’m so happy, so happy,” and she hugs him and says “So am I.” She calls and says “How are you? Do you want to meet and talk?” She drops him off in front of his building and says “It’s just not working.” They go to a restaurant on their first real date and he says “The reason I’m being so picky as to what to eat is that I’m a vegetarian, something I was a little reluctant to tell you so soon,” and she says “Why? It’s not peculiar. It just means we won’t share our entrees except for the vegetables.” He meets a woman at a party. They talk for a long time. She has to leave the party and go to a concert. He gets her phone number and says “I’ll call you,” and she says “I’d like that.” He says goodbye to her at the door and shakes her hand. After she leaves he thinks “That woman’s going to be my wife.”

“Daniela de Montecristo” — Roberto Bolaño

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“Daniela de Montecristo”

by

Roberto Bolaño

translated by Chris Andrews

from Nazi Literature in the Americas

Daniela de Montecristo

Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970

Daniela de Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe (1938-1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941; that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.

Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a rather epic title: The Amazons, published by Quill Argentina, with a preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).

The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich—with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia—and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions about a gland that produces the feeling of love.

“Dangeresque,” a very short story by Diane Williams

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“Dangeresque”

by

Diane Williams

Mrs. White at the Red Shop showed me the beady-eyed garment, but I can’t pay for it. I’m broke! I already own a gold ring and a gold-filled wristwatch and I am very uncomfortable with these. My eyes sweep the garment and its charms.

I am tempted to say this is how love works, bury­ing everyone in the same style.

Through a fault of my own I set off as if I’m on a horse and just point and go to the next village.

This village is where flowers are painted on the sides of my house—big red dots, big yellow balls.

At home, stuck over a clock’s pretty face, is a note from my husband to whom I do not show affection. With a swallow of tap water, I take a geltab.

By this time I had not yet apologized for my actions. Last night my husband told me to get up out of the bed and to go into another room.

My husband’s a kind man, a clever man, a patient man, an honest man, a hard-working man.

Many people have the notion we live in an age where more people who behave just like he does lurk.

See, I may have a childlike attitude, but a woman I once read about attempted a brand new direction with a straight face.

“Intercourse,” a very short story by Diane Williams

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“Intercourse”

by

Diane Williams

At the post office the woman finally got a good long look at the monster, a stare. She was breathing the same air, not as before, de­prived.

When she had first sighted the monster, this woman had not been sure whether or not to trust her instinct.

Was it a monster?

What it was was a monstrous posture she had seen, and the hair on top of the head was heaped so that it appeared as a bulge of hair, with far too much hair coming down at the side, so as to be an abnormal amount. Otherwise, the form of the monster was spin­dly. It was a small-sized monster.

The eyes were pale turquoise. The facial skin was milky milky white. The nose was a short, finely shaped nose. The mouth was full-lipped, painted coral. The hair was the woman’s favorite color hair—cinnamon color. The voice was girl-like when the woman heard it. The black-inked handwriting on the brown-paper-wrapped package was indecipherable from the distance it was observed from, but it was a curvaceous handwrit­ing. The high-heeled shoes with ankle straps were made of metallic gold leather. The purse was like bronze.

Okay, the emergence of this bombshell has gone on long enough for me. Occasionally I select a man, but my preference is for women who could easily steal away my beloved husband who is not taboo.

Carnality is common in rude society. The incarna­tion is temporary or permanent.

“Lifeguard,” a very short story by Diane Williams

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“Lifeguard”

by

Diane Williams

We had tried we had tried my mother and I to get someone to help us stop the flood in the house. We had tried to get some man. So that when my father and the man who guards my father returned, but when they were not yet inside the house, I went out to them.

That man who guards my father was sizing me up like he was wild. His head was on its side in midair bouncing, his shoulder all dipped down because I was forcing him to leave me alone with my father, and I was forcing him to go into the house to deal with the flood and with my mother, so that I was the one left guarding my father, who was wearing those shoes, who was taking those small steps toward the house. I was say­ing to my father, “It’s not so bad, the flood. You’ll see,” and I was talking as slowly as he was walking in those shoes.

Those shoes on my father were the worst things I saw when I was getting him into the house, not getting him into the house, guarding him while he inched his way toward it.

Those shoes did not look like shoes that could hold a foot. There did not look to be room for a foot of flesh inside them, just a foot of bone, long like a pipe and they were forcing their way to the door of his house which was open, but from which we could not hear yet the rushing of water that I had felt rushing inside of the pipe—the hot rushing that I had seen blur the floor so that the floor was no longer a clear thing to see, so that the ceiling of our house was shedding through its lights the way rain comes down out from under a bright sun.

So that of course we were wet, my mother and I, with water binding like bracelets on our wrists, up and down our arms, like extra hair on our foreheads, on our clothes extra shapes, in our shoes which made my feet feel larger and heavier than they had ever felt.

At the door with my father, it was as if everything was hotter and wetter and louder in the house than I had remembered and was getting more so, just with us about ready to enter—and my mother and the man who guards my father must have been the cause. They had had so much time, I thought they had, and together they had not stopped it.

And then, before we ever entered, my father was telling me what we should do, even though I could not make it out, not the words, but I knew he was telling me how to stop the flood, if we wanted to.

“Fridge,” a very short story by Stuart Dybek

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“Fridge”

by

Stuart Dybek

At midnight the expedition of the bride and groom arrives at the Fridge and pauses to get its bearings from the pale, arctic twenty-watt sun before proceeding across a border there is no need to map.

Before them lies the taiga where the wolf vowel of wind penetrates the heart with the aim of a winter draft through an uncaulked bedroom window—a draft that feels its way down corridors of sleep, its Freon breath scented with the rotten moss of unmade salads and wilted scallions.

And beyond the taiga, a tundra stretches that, from its smell, must be the snow-blinding white of sour milk.

There’s a sadness locked away here that emerges slowly like the freezer-burned flavors from some glacial past molded into cubes of ice. There’s a cheese never meant to be blue. There are undesired dreams and memories preserved in an isolation in which dream and memory have become indistinguishable from one another, both smoldering like ghosts of cold around a temperature dial forced beyond its lowest subtraction.

Here are the silent regions of rock-hard meat frozen into obscene postures like the dead around Stalingrad, regions where body heat has vanished beneath a crust of frost, where breath hangs although the breathers are long gone; dangerous regions where, even after the plug has been pulled, love can still be smothered as if it were a child playing hide-and-seek in a junked appliance.

“Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room,” a very short story by Barry Hannah

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“Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room”

by

Barry Hannah

Who is that?” hissed the woman at the corner. Pete and Tardy were necking. They could never quit. They hardly ever heard. The porch where their bench was was purple and smelly with creeping pot plants. Their child, who was thirty, rode a giant trike specially made, he being, you know, simple, back and forth on the walk, singing : Awwwww. Ernnnnnn. Oobbbbbbbb.

The man, remarked only by the hissing woman at the corner, who was Tardy’s mother, walked, or rather verged, here and there, undecided, froth running down his chin and a dagger in his hand. He had an address printed on some length of cardboard. His fingernails were black.

“Out! Out of here, you mange!” shouted Tardy’s mother.

“In, in, in!” the hairy man in the street shouted back.

Pete looked up. “It’s my old college roommate.

Lay off, Mamma,” Pete expressed, rising.

The fellow in the street straightaway made for Pete but got caught in the immense rose hedge. “I knew I’d find you! Peace! Joy! Communion at last!” the filthy fellow shouted as he writhed, disabled.

“Son of a gun!” roared Pete. “Look here, Tardy. It’s old Room Man!”’

“Jumping Jesus, do these thorns hurt!” shouted the filthy hairy fellow. He’d lost his dagger in the leaf mold. That hedge really had him.

“What say?” shouted Pete.

“I got no more discretion, Pete boy! I’m just a walking reminiscence ! Here I am ! I remember you when you were skinny and cried about a Longfellow poem! Your rash! Everything! Edna, Nannie, Fran! Puking at the drive-in!”

“I thought so,” said Pete to Tardy, low, his smile dropped aside. “Would you get me my piece, my charm?”

“Your spiritual phase!” the filthy hairy fellow was screaming. “Your Albert Schweitzer dreams! Signing on the dorm wall with your own blood !” shouted the awful man who was clogged in the hedge.

“Yes,” Pete said, lifting the weary corners of his lips.

Tardy lugged out the heavy piece.

Pete took it and jammed home the two big ones.

“Remember Juanita and her neat one? Played the cornet with her thing and you did the fingering?” screamed the wretched fellow all fouled in the hedge.

Yes.

He cut half his hedge away when he fired the double through it. The dagger blew out in the street along with the creep that held it. All the while Tardy’s mother stood with crossed arms.

The son stopped his giant trike. He said, “Ernnnnn,” to his dad on the porch.

“Albert,” said Pete. “Take care of the stuff in the street,” and within minutes the son was back with the wagon attached and the scoop.

“It makes me not hardly want to kiss anymore,” Tardy said, fft

“A Society of Scoundrels” — Franz Kafka

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“A Society of Scoundrels”

by

Franz Kafka

Translated by Michael Hofmann

There was once a society of scoundrels, or rather not scoundrels per se, just ordinary, average people. They always stuck together. When one of them had perpetrated some rascally act, or rather, nothing really rascally, just averagely bad, he would confess it to the others, and they investigated it, condemned it, imposed penalties, forgave him, etc. This wasn’t corrupt — the interests of the individual and the society were kept in balance and the confessor received the punishment he asked for. So they always stuck together, and even after their death they didn’t abandon their society, but ascended to heaven in a troop. It was a sight of childlike innocence to see them flying. But since everything at heaven’s gate is broken up into its component parts, they plunged down like so many rocks.

“Not His Best” — Joy Williams

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“Not His Best”

by

Joy Williams

from 99 Stories of God

Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer.

He also reprimanded the long-suffering Felice Bauer in a letter: “I did not say that writing ought to make everything clearer, but instead makes everything worse; what I said was that writing makes everything clearer and worse.”

He frequently fretted that he was not a human being and that what he bore on his body was not a human head. Once he dreamt that as he lay in bed, he began to jump out the open window continuously at quarter-hour intervals.

“Then trains came and one after another they ran over my body, outstretched on the tracks, deepening and widening the two cuts in my neck and legs.”

I didn’t give him that one, the Lord said.

NOT HIS BEST

“Ghosts” — Robert Walser

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“Ghosts”

by

Robert Walser

translated by Tom Whalen

I don’t know if it can be to my advantage to review a kind of dime novel in which, as far as I can remember, there stood in a pretty little town a haunted tower.

In my opinion ghosts are very modern. It seems to me it’s become fashionable to believe, with a certain persistent willfulness, in inexplicable appearances.

One must admit this takes courage. As for me, I lived temporarily, if I dare say so straight out, in a bright, wide, two-windowed room. One night I awoke in bed and saw, on one of the armchairs or stools that came with the room, someone sitting.

Something nonexistent was existent, for when I had gone nearer to inspect or examine the place, the something (undoubtedly I was dealing with a ghost here) had evaporated.

To return to my little booklet in which, among other things, a young woman danced: it’s been quite some time since I perused this work, which dealt mainly with an ingenious Hans who, in all innocence and innocuousness, pulled off, as it were, a stroke of genius.

The landscape seemed to me delightfully sketched; the subject matter revolved as much around money as around love. A little river that stretched around the town the author had charmingly entrusted to blab mysterious things. The brooklet in this regard proved to be immensely talented, since it busily burbled and babbled night and day.

Attentively I listened in on the engaging story. Roles were swapped, young sophisticated girls sat in the pleasing interiors of music stores, into which one glanced in passing.

Hans proved to be a complications-disentangler.

I like to imagine my up-to-the-minute diction as tabloidish. I hope this will be judged kindly.

A beautiful woman sat interestingly ghostlike, I mean conspicuously thin, thus in fashion, at a window. Hans bestowed upon her his interest. In his eyes lay so much justifiable or baseless melancholy that the woman leapt up in bewilderment.

These and similar events occurred in the little volume whose author I don’t name because he hardly wishes it. There are little books we read as if we’re eating something delicious. We quickly forget them. After a certain amount of time, perhaps we recall them again. They’re like people we’re capable of loving because they’re not difficult. I also wish this for what I have written here.

Witches, crimes, mutants, shape-shifting horses, feuilletonic digressions etc. | Blog about some recent reading

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I read an excellent trio of novels to close out the summer: Carol Emshwiller’s Mister Boots, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (translated by Sophie Hughes), and Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx (translated by Jane Gambrell). In between, I read most of Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist (translated by Matthew Spencer), described by publisher Sublunary Editions as “short fiction and feuilletonic digressions.” (I had to look up the word “feuilletonic.”)

Mister Boots seems as good an introduction to Carol Emshwilller’s writing as I’ll get. I just sort of picked it up, started reading, and kept going. (The print was larger than the edition of her more-famous novel Carmen Dog that I got around the same time. My eyes have declined more quickly in my early forties than I would have imagined.) Mister Boots is a short, fast-paced novel. It moves along like a ever-morphing picaresque. Set somewhere near the American West proximal to the Great Depression, Emshwiller’s novel is told from the first-person perspective of Bobby. Bobby is a ten-year-old girl, but the world, apart from her sister and mother, don’t know this—-her mother raises her as a boy, dresses her as a boy, addresses her as a boy. This conceit, which even young Bobby understands cannot last forever, is a defense against her malevolent father, a stage magician and conman who wants a son to perform in his act. When Bobby’s mother dies, the father returns to take her and her sister on a wild, surreal tour of performances (and other tricks). They bring with them Mister Boots, a man who sometimes turns into a horse. I loved Mister Boots and probably read it way too quickly. It’s surreal stuff, told from the perspective of a child that really captures what young consciousness is like–slippery, trying to match causes and effect, lacking the wisdom that is experience, but also teeming with the holy powers of innocence.

I then read Tatyana Tolstoya’s post-apocalyptic satire The Slynx. The book is funny and abject, and the world Tolstoya conjures is totally gross, but also a place I was sad to leave (the general vibe reminds me of Aleksei German’s film adaptation of Hard to Be a God). The Slynx is about 300 pages but I would’ve read another 700 happily. The central hero is a lunking would-be intellectual named Benedikt; the setting is a few centuries after the Blast has reduced humanity back to the Dark Ages; most of the descendants of the pre-Blast populace endure Consequences—mutations big and small (our boy Benedikt has a cute little tail). There are also elders whose consequence is a tenuous immortality—they survive the blast and continue living (as long as they want to), an ugly curse. We first meet Benedikt as a kind of copyist, a Bartleby maybe, but one who wants more from life. He marries into a near-aristocratic family, where he has access to a huge samizdat library. More problems ensue. Ultimately, The Slynx is a postmodern fable, a book about reading itself. It’s grimy and gross and I loved it and will read it again.

I devoured Fernanda Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season and then started in again. The novel’s blurb compares it to “Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 of Faulkner’s novels,” which is high and true praise. As I stated, I immediately began rereading Hurricane Season after I started it. Like a lot of Faulkner’s work, Melchor’s narrative construction obscures, hides, and even elides important events. Crimes get lost in details. The story is set in and around a podunk Mexican town. It begins with a troop of slingshot-armed youngsters finding the body of “the Witch,” a hated and celebrated icon of the town. From there, the novel moves its camera to hover over a few key characters, letting us into their consciousness to get bits and pieces that may or may not add up to a larger picture. The village is a haunted, haunting place, a cursed world vibrating with bad mojo, drugs, rape, murder…as its publishers promised, Melchor’s world recalls Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, especially the infamous chapter “The Part about the Crimes.” (There is a fantastic moment in the fourth chapter when the third-person free indirect style slips into the language of police reports and detective inquiries.) Hurricane Season’s abjection, despair, and squalor also recalls Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, Faulkner’s A Light in August, and Bernhard’s Gargoyles. And, like Bernhard and Krasznahorkai (and his follower W.G. Sebald), Melchor crafts her novel as a brick of paragraphless text, a sometimes-flowing, sometimes-smothering miasma of words, words, words. Crimes, witches, grudges, and curses, curses, curses: Magical curses, literal curses, cursed text messages, and good old fashioned curse words. Hurricane Season is a devastating, cruel novel, but Melchor concludes it with a strange moment of grace–not for its characters, but for its readers, whom she ferries “out of this hole.” I went right back into the hole.

And—Kleist’s Anecdotes—well, I’ve kept it in my car up until this afternoon, when I finally brought it back into the house. I’ve been reading it while I wait in the carpool lane at my daughter’s school, her new school, the same high school I graduated from in fact. I read three or four as I wait for her and the other carpoolers to emerge. I’ve read a few of the anecdotes collected here before (I think I first became interested in Kleist after reading Donald Barthelme mention him as an influence). Here’s publisher Sublunary’s blurb:

Long available and celebrated in German—Kafka himself championed the 1911 Rowohlt edition of Anekdoten—Anecdotes gathers the first extensive English-language collection of Heinrich von Kleist’s short fiction and feuilletonic digressions that appeared in Berliner Abendblätter, the newspaper for which he served as editor from 1810 to 1811. Writing under increasingly unfriendly social and political conditions, this is arguably Kleist at his funniest and most irreverent, not shying away from dirty jokes while nevertheless displaying the same knack for the stylish prose that Rilke called “beautiful and so blind and skillful”.

And here’s a sample (in translation by Matthew Spencer):

Traveling Salesman — Stuart Dybek

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“Traveling Salesman”

by

Stuart Dybek

He finds himself stepping off the bus in some burg he’s already bored with. Picking his teeth for 200 miles—here’s where he spits the toothpick out. Past Holiday Inn the neighborhoods get dark. All-night laundromats where women with circles under their eyes press laundered underwear, warm as bread, against their sinuses. Finally, he’s signing the register at a funeral home where he knows no one, but is mistaken for a long-lost friend of the deceased, for someone who has dislocated his life to make the hazardous journey on a night when the dead man’s own children have avoided him. Once again instinct has taken him where he’s needed; where the unexpected transforms routine into celebration. He kneels before the corpse, striking his forehead against the casket.

“Mutations,” a very short tale from Jorge Luis Borges

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“Mutations”

by

Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by Andrew Hurley

In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylae and bequeathed to Harald Sigurdson, for all time, six feet of English earth.

Several days later, someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horseman; a coil of rope hung about his mount’s chest. I learned that the rope, which had once flown through the air and lassoed bulls in the pasture, was now just an insolent decoration on a rider’s Sunday riding gear.

In the cemetery on the Westside I saw a runic cross carved out of red marble; its arms splayed and widened toward the ends and it was bounded by a circle. That circumscribed and limited cross was a figure of the cross with unbound arms that is in turn the symbol of the gallows on which a god was tortured—that “vile machine” decried by Lucían of Samosata.

Cross, rope, and arrow: ancient implements of mankind, today reduced, or elevated, to symbols. I do not know why I marvel at them so, when there is nothing on earth that forgetfulness does not fade, memory alter, and when no one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.