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.
