Twitchy Stories: Levy’s Black Vodka

Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka collects ten short stories that are almost painfully pithy: in my last post, I described Levy’s stories as “twitchily enjoyable, instant gratification with mini-epiphanies that completely absorbed me.” Twitchy stories are especially difficult to write about because they’re so here-and-now: it’s hard to retain and then convey the feeling of instant gratification that comes from those mini-epiphanies without retelling everything. By contrast, I think sneaky, slow-burn short stories, like those in Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons, which I wrote about last time, are easier to describe because they leave behind more traces of atmosphere and mood.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the stories in Black Vodka… and have nothing but respect for Levy’s ability to write compact observations of contemporary culture, pain, alienation, and the strange details that accompany them. I also love Levy’s directness, like this, from “Black Vodka”: “After a while she orders a slice of cheesecake and asks me if I was born a hunchback.” This isn’t a line I’d marked while reading, it’s one of many lines I noticed in a random flip through the book. I don’t idolize lovely sentences because, alas, lovely sentences rarely pile up to form lovely stories or lovely novels… but Levy does pretty well with hers.

Here are a few notes on four stories I particularly enjoyed:

“Shining a Light” is set in Prague, where one Alice has arrived without her baggage. She meets two Serbian women at an outdoor movie screening then meets a man, Alex, through them, setting up opportunities for Levy to parallel losses of physical baggage and homeland baggage. Alice does fine without wardrobe changes, “Later, when she walks over the cobblestones towards her hotel in Malá Strana she realises that arriving in a country with nothing but the clothes she is wearing has made her more reckless but more introspective, too.” The story was commissioned for an installation by the Wapping Project; four writers were asked to write texts to accompany a photographic narrative.

The main character in “Stardust Nation” drinks cognac out of an eggcup in the early morning: the story felt almost comfortingly familiar to me, with wonderful elements of madness and transference that I won’t describe, lest I give the whole story away. I think the familiarity came from some of the odd Russian stories I’ve read… And I wrote “kind of sweet” on the Contents page next to the title “Simon Tegala’s Heart in 12 Parts,” a twelve-installment story of a man who, among other things, “[decides] to throw the I Ching to discover if Naomi loved him.” He also buys an old Cadillac to please his beloved. But…

And, finally, there is “Vienna,” which begins with this, “‘Before I forget,’ Magret’s voice is low and vague, ‘I want to test my new microwave.’” Sure, why not? She tests with langoustines, a rather risky test, I’d say, but the microwave works. So do the languages, cultures, millennia, and sadness Levy piles into “Vienna,” a story that only takes a bit more time to read than Magret’s langoustines took to cook.

After writing this post, I Googled, curious to find what others might have written about Black Vodka, which comes out in late February. I found this Literateur piece by Alex Christofi, who sums up the collection with this, “Here, as in her previous plays, stories and novels, her writing exhibits a rhetorical severity which, at its best, has a mythic, lullaby quality, experimental and at the same time simple and beautiful.” Black Vodka is my first Levy book so I can’t compare, but Christofi’s description certainly fits Black Vodka. And “rhetorical severity” has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Black Vodka from And Other Stories; I met Stefan Tobler, publisher at And Other Stories in 2011.

Up next: Moving on to longer stories with Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts, a book I’d call a collection of five long stories. Then Therese Bohman’s Drowned, a not-very-long novel. And Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray.

Sneaky Stories: Monzó’s Morons

As someone who reads fiction of all lengths but much (¡much!) prefers novels, it felt like a slightly strange twist of blogging fate to first receive two story collections… and then read them in rapid succession: Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons, in Peter Bush’s translation of the Catalan collection known as Mil Cretins, and Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka. What struck me most—beyond the reminder that I truly do love short stories and should read more of them—is that the two writers’ stories had such opposite effects on me. Monzó’s stories about the absurd and alienated are sneakily enjoyable, slow-burn stories I didn’t necessarily realize I’d enjoyed until I finished them. Levy’s stories are twitchily enjoyable, instant gratification with mini-epiphanies that completely absorbed me. Today I’ll look at a few of Monzó’s stories; Levy’s are up next time.

Here are a few of the morons I particularly enjoyed:

My favorite story may well be the first, “Mr. Beneset,” about a son who visits his father in an old people’s home. The son finds his father at a mirror: “He is straightening some lingerie, black and cream lingerie, the sort the French call culottes and the English French knickers.” Mr. Beneset tells his son to knock before entering, but, oh well, it seems Dad Beneset didn’t hear the knock because he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. It’s not the touch of voyeurism or lingerie that appeals to me, it’s the quiet, sad absurdity of Mr. Beneset’s life and advanced age, housed in a place where people die (“leave”) around him, where life is lived by the meal schedule but there’s freedom and time to fuss over lipstick and nail polish. But not, it seems, to shave one’s legs for wearing tights.

“Love Is Eternal,” the second story, begins with the chance meeting of a former boyfriend and girlfriend. They get back together… and each of them does something moronic, bringing the story to an O. Henry-ish twist ending that implies a special sort of hell for the narrator boyfriend. I think personal hells might be a key to being a Monzó moron: these people live in their own private torture zones. I enjoyed “Praise” a lot, too: writer Daniel Broto is asked in an interview to name a book he recently enjoyed: he mentions one and then has to live with the consequences, partly because he raises the expectations of the man who wrote the book he cited. People! Do us all a favor! Never tell someone “We should meet for coffee!” unless you mean it.

Being a long-form fiction kind of reader, I can’t say the microstories interested me as much as the longer ones, but some were fun. “Beyond the Sore,” with a man who’s asked to comment on a book he hasn’t read, focuses on the issue of how to respond without being a total moron… what a pseudo-problem! Honesty is so obviously the path of least moronism, I don’t get why people can’t get over this one and tell the truth. And then there’s “The Fork,” which addresses an age-old question: If a fork falls on the floor and nobody notices, did the fork fall?

A fork falls in one of Levy’s stories, too, so I’ll pick up there next time…

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of A Thousand Morons from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating. Open Letter also gave me not one but two tie-in A Thousand Morons t-shirts… hmm, a subtle hint? The shirts have the same design as the book cover so have a “special” look when worn on a body. Thanks a lot, Mr. Beneset!

Fire: Fahrenheit 451 and The Book Thief

I first read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a long time ago, probably in high school: about all I remembered until last week was that firemen started fires rather than preventing them. And their specialty was burning books, which were outlawed.

Same as mine.
Price: $1.25 

When Ray Bradbury died earlier this year and I read, a little later, Russian fiction that referred to him, I took out my old copy of Fahrenheit 451. The glue in the binding cracked and the pages were yellowed, but the story itself felt ridiculously up-to-the-minute, despite having been written in the fifties. The biggest surprise was that Bradbury all but predicted reality TV, viewers’ extreme attachment to TV characters they think of as family, and viewers’ extreme attachment to their TV parlors and equipment. Even Christ has become one of the TV family, making, as one character says, “veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.”

The personal stories of Guy Montag, the fireman who begins collecting books and doubting his work, and his TV-addled wife Millie, felt secondary to me compared to Bradbury’s dystopian world, where people drive so super-fast that billboards are super-long and people no longer listen to each other because their TV friends seem realer than their real friends.

[Now, watch out for spoilers…] Montag’s sudden, fiery separation from his job and his wife are less surprising than the fact that his escape is carefully tracked and presented by the media. Even more interesting, though, is that Montag finds readers—some are former professors—who memorize books so they can recite them. This reminded me of Soviet-era samizdat (self-publishing, often on a typewriter) and memorization of forbidden poems. The idea of carrying books around in one’s head, combined with the pictures of future TV and the relative peace outside the city (there’s also a war going on…) made the book well worth rereading.

I read another book involving book burning—Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief—but it’s set in the past, Nazi Germany, instead of the future. The Book Thief is probably as familiar these days as Fahrenheit 451 so I won’t go into detail... you probably already know, for example, that Death narrates this thick novel about a girl named Liesel Meminger who goes to live with a foster family in a town called Molching. I very rarely read young adult books but this one caught me, probably because I thought Zusak made a wise choice in making Death his first-person narrator. For one thing, as an omnipresent and omnipotent narrator, Death can offer, occasionally and a bit officiously, historical details that readers might or might not already know. But Death (the narrator) is also surprisingly compassionate and humorous, as is Zusak’s book, thanks to characters like Liesel the book thief, her accordion-playing foster father Hans, and her friend Rudy who reveres Jesse Owens, a dangerous habit in Nazi Germany.

Up Next: Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons.

Where There’s Smoke (on the Cover): Halfon’s Polish Boxer

There are times when cover art truly does complement—and perhaps even compliment—a book’s content: Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer really is a smoky wisp of a book, with just 188 smallish pages and several ethereal plot-like lines that float through ten stories of varying length. I read the book in the English translation of the Spanish original El boxeador polaco, which was translated by Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead, and Anne McLean… with the help of Halfon, who lives in Nebraska but frequently returns to Guatemala, where he was born. Their work, which crossed many time zones, feels seamless, creating one voice.

The Polish Boxer is almost as difficult to describe as smoke, too: these linked, first-person stories are thoroughly imaginable and tangible, but they also dissipate, blending together like smoke and fog, leaving lovely traces of meaning as Halfon explores identity and meaning. Halfon’s made-for-metafiction-narrator is an academic named Eduardo Halfon. On the first page, Halfon-as-teacher describes a classroom scene meant to instruct readers, too, mentioning an essay by Ricardo Piglia that discusses “the dual nature of the short story,” which contains a visible narrative and a secret tale. This first story, “Distant,” tells of a scholarship student who writes poetry; he meets after class with Halfon, making the individual student feel like a secret tale set against the backdrop of a more visible, public narrative about class meetings.

Halfon begins dropping hints about the Polish boxer—and his grandfather and Auschwitz—in the next story, “Twaining,” about a trip to North Carolina for a Mark Twain conference. We continue on to “Epistrophy,” in which we meet Eduardo’s dishy girlfriend and hear Serbian-gypsy pianist Milan Rakic play music not listed on the program, than advance (after a quick stop in “White Smoke” at a Scottish bar that’s not in Scotland) to “The Polish Boxer,” which begins with the number, 69752, tattooed on Eduardo’s grandfather’s arm. Eduardo’s grandfather tells him it’s his telephone number, tattooed so he won’t forget. We know that’s not true.

The Polish boxer, according to the grandfather, is someone who helped save him in the camps… but the story turns out to be (maybe? truly?) untrue, even if it sounds like a great story. Even better, on the last page of the book, two of Eduardo’s grandfather’s friends discuss him, offering details that don’t quite match Eduardo’s memories of his grandfather, showing, once again, the shiftiness of identity and how we describe it.

I particularly enjoyed the story line about Rakic, in which Eduardo flies to post-war Serbia—wars are important in The Polish Boxer—to find the man, who’s sent him postcards from all over as he tours. Eduardo enlists the help of gypsies in Serbia, who look at Rakic’s photo and say he can’t be a gypsy. The gypsies, Eduardo says, look as if “they existed outside of this world.” I think the same could probably be said about Eduardo, his grandfather, his girlfriend and her orgasm drawings, the elusive Milan Rakic, and all the rest of us. A number tattooed on an arm may be indelible and it may symbolize a lot, but identity—in the sense of a person’s real, personal depths—is something as elusive and subjective as a wisp of smoke.

Disclosures: I picked up a copy of The Polish Boxer from Bellevue Literary Press at BookExpo America. Thank you!

Up Next: It remains to be seen… 

Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is that annoyingly near-perfect book that I admire tremendously for its technical qualities but can’t quite find myself loving because it feels too hermetically sealed. I’m sure you already know about the book: it won a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle award, and lots of other honors. And one chapter of the book is written and presented in PowerPoint form.

A Visit from the Goon Squad strings thirteen stories, one of which is written in PowerPoint form, though you already knew that, into a novel that zigs and zags between characters and times, returning often to two core figures. Bennie is described on the back cover as “an aging former punk rocker and record executive.” Sasha is “the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.” Put in more direct terms: as a kid, Bennie was in a band called The Flaming Dildos, which I take as a name that refers to fakery and imitations of, ah, more real things, and Sasha is a klepto who loves to keep and display what she steals.

During the course of the book, Egan introduces us to those same Flaming Dildos, a bunch of San Francisco teenagers, including Bennie, who want to be punks, and shows us how they and the people around them behave and age, not always very gracefully. Time is the goon squad here and Egan neatly threads this and other motifs, like Sasha’s stolen goods, through the stories. Conformism and its “non” are everywhere, too: Bennie and his friends aren’t much punkier than I was. Sure, I went to see the Dead Kennedys when a friend decided to be a punk promoter one summer but my spikes were really a bracelet, not something dangerous.

“Neatly” is my problem with A Visit from the Goon Squad: I enjoyed reading the book, looked forward to reading it, and think it’s very, very good, but it feels a little too much like how Bennie hears digitized music:

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

The italics are Egan’s. And the voices in Goon Squad were a little digitized for me, not quite gritty or distinct enough to make some of the chapter-stories in Goon Squad feel fully polyphonic or convincing. One of the most interesting chapter-stories was “Selling the General,” which connects less to Bennie and Sasha than most of the other pieces and describes the efforts of Dolly (a.k.a. La Doll), a p.r. specialist attempting to improve the image of a dictator. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the story is less connected and less music-related than most of the others.

The final story-chapter, “Pure Language,” set in a future New York City, imagines even more ubiquitous uses of mobile devices and txt language than we have now (*shudder*) but the hero is the guy without an online presence, “a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched.” And there, again, is my misgiving about the book, a misgiving that feels slight and churlish: the book lacks real rage. That may be intentional but I can’t be sure because the book felt so polished, so cleanly written and so careful, even a tiny bit high-flown. In other words, it felt technically perfect but most of the tone and language felt so smooth—too controlled, digitized, and ironic—that they crowded out the book’s messages and characters for me.

Disclosures: I bought my own copy of the book. I met Jennifer Egan, a college classmate I never knew in college, at a reading in Portland several years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of her books, particularly Look at Me.

Up Next: Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer, another book of linked stories.