Category: Review

Of that which is remembered: Memory Theater by Simon Critchley

Philosopher Simon Critchley’s curious fictional debut, a detour down a pathway that blurs the lines between essay, fiction, and what might  almost be considered speculative memoir; opens with one miserable protagonist pursued by a relentless insomnia and an abiding fear of death. Our narrator, who shares both name and profession with his progenitor, has been been possessed by terror and sleeplessness for three years by this point and is, quite frankly, “exhausted with exhaustion”. And rightly so, he has put himself through quite the ordeal. In the tale that follows in the brief novel, Memory Theater, he invites the reader to join him on a journey that combines a reflective review of the history of the philosophical fascination with memory and a strange discovery that fuels his own descent into madness.

Memtheatre

The story begins with the protagonist’s decision to relocate to New York from the UK in search of a more accommodating academic environment. However, first he must clear out his office at the University of Essex, and in the process of sorting through his books and papers, he comes across a stack of five boxes tucked away, half hidden. Upon investigation he discovers that they contain the unpublished papers and notes of his friend and former teacher, Michel Haar, who had passed away the previous year. In keeping with his friend’s predilection for astrology, the boxes are labeled with zodiac signs, from Capricorn to Gemini. For some reason Taurus is either missing or absent.

In the boxes he finds letters, manuscripts, maps. He is especially entranced by a treatise entitled “Le théâtre de mémoire selon G. W. F. Hegel”, an original reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, informed by the notion of the memory theatre as explored in the writings of historian Frances Yates in her classic book, The Art of Memory – a reading of Occidental history as a quest to develop mnemonic systems to capture, contain, and retrieve knowledge.

“Artificial memory machines litter history. Human beings seem to be persistently seduced by the idea that a theater, a palace, or a machine might be constructed that would hold the sum of knowledge in a way that would permit total recall. All that we would need to do in order to obtain absolute knowledge would be to enter the theater or machine and commit to memory everything therein.”

At this point, Critchely’s hero sets off on an overview of the philosophical attempts to realize this ambition, starting with the ancient Greek poet Simonides and moving forward through to the ambitious efforts of Guilo Delmino Camillo in the first half of the 1500’s to obtain the funds to construct a full size theater based on a model he reportedly built and described, culminating ultimately with speculation that the Globe Theatre may have been conceived with similar designs.

The notion of the memory theater enchants the protagonist, especially his friend’s reading via Hegel of memory, not as a static arrangement of information set out on the steps of an amphitheater and viewed from the stage, but as a series of moving images, a history of the Spirit coming into being… memory as process, to be viewed from any spot in the theater. Yet he is troubled by his own experience of memory loss as a result of an accident earlier in his life, recalling that: “My self felt like a theatre with no memory. All the seats were empty. Nothing was happening on stage.”

Overwhelmed by his findings, he retreats to rest for the night before opening the fifth and final box. That night he is visited by a fantastic dream in which he floats through a Gothic cathedral. Magical, vast and vivid in its imagery this dream sequence marks the transition of the novel from the drier, firmer ground of of the academic essay turned memoir, into a space where the impossible is possible. It also provides our first indication that our narrator is more unstable and neurotic than his philosophical lecturing may have suggested.

The following day, on his way back to the university the dream haunts him:

“I… thought about my dream of the Gothic cathedral as a vast memory theater. The medieval love of the figural, the dramatic, and the grotesque was not, then, evidence of either some tortured sexual repression or the liberation from such repression, as we moderns arrogantly assume, but is simply a powerful and vivid aid to recollection.”

But the metaphor quickly expands… a town, a city, the globe, the night sky. He comes to wonder if everyone is their own memory theater, tossing and playing with the idea until he arrives at the office and opens the Pisces box. Inside, at the bottom of the container, he finds a stack of circular charts reproduced on stiff cards. He takes them to be astrological charts but, at closer inspection, he realizes that they are, in truth, memory maps: circular diagrams working inward from biographical details, through an individual’s works to, at the very centre, the date, location and cause of death.

Making his way through the charts, he finds that Michel had drawn up a map for each of his favourite thinkers, and then, moving further along, for various colleagues and contemporaries. What might seem a fancy is rendered prophetic by the fact that a few of the charts assigned to individuals who themselves died after their creator’s death were chillingly accurate in their predictions of the exact details of the subject’s demise.

And then, the fictional Simon finds his own map. The central circle is inscribed: “le 13 juin, 2010, 1551h, Den Bosch, hémorragie cébébrale.” His reaction is cool, cerebral hemmorhage when he would have expected lung cancer. “But where the fuck is Den Bosch?”

Moving on to the United States armed with this knowledge, our protagonist seems to be relaxed and comforted by the certainty of a date and time for his own impending passing. He is productive, and as happy as any philosopher obsessed with dying is likely to be – that is, until the missing link, the box marked Taurus arrives.

Inside he finds a small wooden model of a memory theater, presumably after that which Camillo was purported to have created. And then things get very weird. He begins to experience extreme phantom pains, he starts to hallucinate, anxiety consumes him, he becomes isolated and ultimately ramps up into full blown mania. Tracking down Den Bosch, home of one Hieronymus – master of a memory theater worthy of the totality of heaven and hell if there ever was one – he relocates to the Netherlands and begins to construct a life sized memory theater of his own. A place to die and become god-like at once.

It is quite impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to come to this work without an interest in philosophy. There is a glossary that closes out the work that lists the key personages and concepts that appear in the preceding pages so detailed knowledge is by no means a prerequisite. But it would not hurt. I confess that I arrived with some background, including a degree in philosophy and my own yellowed copy of Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory.

I have also had a longstanding interest in the nature and limitations of memory. I spent a decade working with adult survivors of acquired brain injury; an opportunity to become well acquainted with the range of memory impairments afforded by accident or illness. Our clients included several individuals with severe anoxic injuries that left them with no ability to transfer episodic experience into short term, and ultimately, long term memory. Two had been professionals, one a young lawyer, the other a doctor, prior to injuries that had occurred decades earlier. Given a chance to expound facts from their respective areas of expertise, recall was impressive, if outdated. But leave the room and return a minute later and neither would know they had ever seen you before. With a ten second memory, a memory theatre is an absurd notion, it’s more like a room at the end of a long tunnel with blank walls. A tunnel that grows ever longer over time.

I imagine that this background is, in part, what drew my attention to this book when it was released in the UK by Fitzcarraldo last fall. At the time though, I could not know what would lie between my initial awareness of Memory Theater and my opportunity to read it. With respect to the obsession with death that entertains Critchley, fictional and, apparently, actual as well; I cannot say it ever was a source of particular concern for me. That is until a few minutes after midnight on the 27th of July this year – the anniversary of a marriage which is long over but never ceases to be the harbinger of strange occurrences for me. I had fallen asleep, still exhausted and fighting what I assumed to be prolonged jet lag after a long flight home from South Africa, when a pulmonary embolism nearly claimed my life. By an eerie set of coincidences, my adult son heard me struggling to breathe and was able to call for support and start chest compressions in time.

I was fortunate. No prosaic dance with death that one, no necronautical conceit. I had prepared for the fact that my plane could fall out of the sky or that I could be mugged on the streets of Cape Town (which I very nearly was), but to die in my sleep at that moment? No I was not ready to accept that fate. And apart from the days immediately before and after the event, I survived with my memory intact.

So of what worth the notion of a memory theater? We cannot look forward, we can only look back, and, if there is time, the theater I wish to construct is one that I write into being – for myself and for those I love.

Memory Theater is now available in North America through Other Press.

For all the restless souls: The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig

The landscape haunting the seven intermeshed stories that make up The Sleep of the Righteous by the late German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, is decidedly bleak. The fulcrum around which these stories pivots is an industrial town south of Leipzig – run down, defined by its drabness, perpetually unfinished, bordered by mine pits, the ruins of munitions factories, a lake, marshes,and, beyond that, the forest. Before and after reunification, this town remains a place in which time exists on another plane of reality, at least as far as the narrators – all varying shades of the same man with more than a passing resemblance to Hilbig himself – experience or remember it:

“Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog banks that merged beneath an earth-colored sky appeared unlikely to pass for decades to come. And more and more smoke seemed to spill from the sodden lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal.”

sleepThis powerful collection is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on childhood, coming of age or, as it often seems, waiting to come of age, to “rise at last from the state of useless, unfinished, in-between beings”. Set in the years immediately following the Second World War, the town is a place where men are in short supply. The majority of the children are fatherless, their mothers widowed, and few babies are born. Consequently, relationships and social dynamics are skewed. In the opening story, “The Place of Storms”, the young narrator endeavours to negotiate the murky waters between the realm of the “little children” and that of the “older children”. Rumours that his grandfather has a gun boost his status and potential for crossing the divide, while the horrific swim trunks his mother knits him complete with suspenders are a decided barrier. All of the awkward anxiety of youth is played out in the grimy pools of the abandoned mine pits at the end of the street where children wile away the summer hours divorced from the world of the suffering, lamenting adults in their lives.

The stories in the second part are set in the 1990’s, after the Wall has come down. The protagonists are all now grown men, writers, who have long since moved away from this small town, but find that they are unable to stay away. Restless, they regularly return to encounter ghosts, to visit an aging mother, or to escape a disintegrating relationship. No matter how long they may have been away, they never really leave the place behind. But they return to a town that is dying, industries and businesses that have been abandoned, and memories that cannot be escaped. In the final, and longest story, “The Dark Man”, the unnamed narrator is an established author who encounters, on the darkened streets of his old hometown, a stranger who has pursed him and now reveals that he was the Stasi agent responsible for intercepting and reading the writer’s correspondence. He claims to have a collection of letters originally intended for our hero’s former lover, a woman who presently lies near death. The narrator is disturbed, but determined not to let this curious relic of the GDR get the better of him – he denies any suggestion that he and his enemy have anything in common. Yet when he gets back to his mother’s apartment, the man in the bathroom mirror bears a haunting resemblance to what he could manage to make out of the stranger in the dark.

The Sleep of the Righteous is one of those books where you may well be inclined to stop and reread a paragraph several times before moving on, not because it is opaque or dense, but because the language is so captivating; the flow and rhythms, like eddies in a stream of water, swirling, reversing, and moving forward again. The brief title story is a sadly lyrical meditation on the cycle of guilt and recrimination that binds and defines the relationship between a boy and his grandfather who, in a reorganization of sleeping arrangements, end up sharing a bed following the death of the grandmother – a demise that one of them might have inadvertently caused. It opens:

“The dark divests us of our qualities. — Though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting substance from the darkness… it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten… it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. And we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling each other, still and hostile.”

Night after night, grandfather and grandson twist and turn to a nocturnal chorus of queries and accusations, in this poetic evocation of the tensions that underlie the fictions that families maintain to make sense of the very ordinary tragedies that strike close to home.

In his introduction to this volume, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, writes that in focusing on the mundane, the everyday life in East Germany, Hilbig manages to heighten the oppressiveness of that existence, rendering it all the more horrific as a consequence: “He wrote his astounding novels about a world in which only the weak, the sensitive, those incapable of bargaining and in no way heroic, can sense the chaos and the surrealism.” However, the measured, heavily weighted quality that hangs over the stories in The Sleep of the Righteousness, is bouyed by the sheer beauty of the prose and the quiet resilience with which the protagonists respond to the circumstances that history has gifted them. This could be a depressing read but somehow it is not.

Translator Isabel Fargo Cole, in a recent interview in World Literature Today, indicates that this collection is one of Hilbig’s most autobiographical works. His narrators tend to share the same basic features of his background – his grandfather emigrated from Poland, his father disappeared at Stalingrad, and he grew up with his mother in a household dominated by women. The town he mythologizes in his tales is modeled after the same one where he was born and grew up. Yet, it does not feel liked these are connected as part of a continuous narrative so much as each protagonist seems to have a similar launching point from which he proceeds to tell his story. There are overlaps and divergences along the way.

The Sleep of the Righteous is published by Two Lines Press. Along with his earlier novel,  I, which was also translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and released by Seagull Books this summer, English speaking readers finally have a chance to experience the sombre magic of Wolfgang Hilbig. And, hopefully, look forward to more.

What can or should a story be? The Swan Whisperer by Marlene van Niekerk

The Swan Whisperer by Marlene van Niekerk is the literary equivalent of an impossible space – that is, this 40-page sewn paperback, lush with illustrations by fellow South African, famed artist William Kentridge, contains a tale much larger than its size would suggest. It begins modestly. Subtitled An Inaugural Lecture, van Niekerk opens with a series of questions for her imagined audience:

“What does one teach when one is a teacher of Creative Writing? The true? The good? The beautiful? Should one teach criticism, fantasy, or faith? What is the use of literature? What is its place on the greater canvas of human endeavours? And perhaps I should also ask: Can a story offer consolation?”

Voluminous texts have been penned to examine questions such as these, and yet within the 18 pages that lie ahead once the illustrations have been accounted for, is our esteemed professor at the lectern is planning to explore them all? No, she is going to tell a story, offer a fable within a fable, share an experience that she claims rendered these questions irrelevant for her.

2015-11-11 03.16.04What plays out in this inventive and thoughtful allegorical tale is an exploration of the relationship between language and meaning, meaning and truth, truth and the stories we tell which, in turn, leads back to language. Van Niekerk casts herself in the role of the skeptic. At the outset she is busy with the final revisions on a novel that is almost complete. Around her, the rest of her life and responsibilities have been suspended while she survives on frozen dinners and ignores her untended house and garden. The last thing she is prepared to welcome at this moment is a 67-page letter from a former student who, she discovers, is writing from a hospital bed in Amsterdam. She had recommended him for a student fellowship in the city with the thought that the change of place might finally help this pale, anxious young man finish off his MA and move on. But she is certain without reading beyond the first few paragraphs that there is little hope for him and most certainly nothing in his massive missive for her.

And so it goes. After reading a little further, she tucks his letter into a drawer and forgets about it until an unusual package arrives: a dummy of her new novel in which he has written notes and dates, along with 16 cassette tapes. Gradually she will be drawn into the story he wants – no, needs – to share. Cynically she reads about how her student, Kasper Olwagon, believes he has discovered, quite magically almost, an unusual homeless man who seems to have an uncanny ability to summon swans to himself. He watches the man for a while and ultimately takes this vagrant home. He longs to know how this apparent ‘swan whisperer’ calls to the magnificent birds, but for all of his efforts, Kasper is unable to encourage or help him to speak.

2015-11-11 03.18.55In his long letter, Kasper anticipates his professor’s reaction, but he persists and over time, as she is drawn into the mystery and returns repeatedly to his letter for clues. She reads about his attempts to extract meaning from the murmurings he believes he heard, his desire to translate the language of swans. She hears in his efforts echoes of Afrikaans. Slowly she will begin to understand the meaning of the cryptic note that accompanied his parcel containing the book and tapes. The last words he wrote to her were: “Farewell to the worlds of will and representation!” As readers we are invited to follow the entwined journeys of student and teacher to that place where all of those questions posed at the beginning seem to be archaic, irrelevant. And once those rhetorical questions are left behind, one begins to appreciate the expanse of the impossible space contained in this small book.

2015-11-11 03.21.17The Swan Whisperer is the latest addition to the “Cahier Series”, a joint project of the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris and Sylph Editions. Eminent writers and translators are invited to offer their reflections on writing, on translating, and on the intersection between the two activities. Each volume is accompanied by illustrations. Here, the striking black and white drawings by William Kentridge act almost as a visual soundtrack. His work has a tendency to explode off the page. The images complement the story by exploring the relationship between artists, animals and language. The text is translated from the Afrikaans by Marius Swart and the author.

2015-11-11 03.13.44I have to add that this particular volume held a special appeal for me. This spring I read, for the first time, Marlene van Niekerk’s magnificent novel Agaat. Not only is this a complex, deeply moving story; but the way that language is evoked and brought into play presented a challenge well met by the translator, Michiel Heyns. Not long after this encounter I made my first visit to South Africa and I had the singular pleasure of experiencing William Kentridge’s installation “The Refusal of Time” at the National Gallery in Cape Town. It was, I felt, like a command performance as no one else even ventured into the room beyond a quick glance at the door. Their loss and one of my fondest memories of my stay in the city.

And now I have both artists together in this enchanting and thought provoking book.

Last letter from Petrópolis: Montaigne by Stefan Zweig

Over the course of his life, Stefan Zweig was a most prolific writer, known not only for his novels and plays, but also for a wide range of historical and literary biographies. He has been criticized as a lightweight by those who fail to appreciate his charms, but it is difficult to deny the passion for literature and lifelong learning that informed his work. With his biographical subjects he followed the topics and personalities that caught his attention and, perhaps as a consequence, he was drawn to write about those whose work and ideas he admired, as well as some of the figures who played darker roles in history.

motaigneThe last of the writers to captivate him, the subject of his final book, was Michel de Montaigne. Hitler’s rise to power in 1934 drove Zweig from his native Austria to England, but by 1940, with Europe torn apart by war, he crossed the Atlantic to New York City where he stayed briefly before moving even further to Petrópolis, a German community in Brazil. Here in the mountains north of Rio de Janeiro, far from the library he been forced to abandon in Vienna, he would uncover a dusty copy of Montaigne’s Essais in the cellar of his house. He made this fortuitous discovery in the autumn of 1941 and his delight in it would preoccupy the final months of his life. In February of 1942, Stefan Zweig and his wife were found dead in their home. It is not certain but, as much as Montaigne provided him the comfort of a kindred spirit speaking out across the centuries, he may have also inspired or reinforced his decision to end his own life.

Zweig opens his biography with a confession that when he first encountered Montaigne at the age of 20, he was filled with youthful idealism for the new century that was dawning. He could not imagine what relevance he might find in this “Frenchman already yellowed by time and lost in the riddles of his Latin quotations”. Ahead he could only envision the prospects of peace and progress. Rediscovering Montaigne 40 years later, he found immediate parallels between the violent upheaval of the years of the Reformation and the devastating collapse of 20th century glory into the brutal waves of intolerance and destruction sweeping Europe. Curiously, the age of 20 was also the age at which Montaigne himself decided to end his formal education on the conviction that by 20 the soul is formed and thus, beyond that point, the spirit will not be further enhanced. He would, of course, turn his attentions inward in his lifelong effort to understand that soul.

There is, in the course of this short biographical account, little that will be new to anyone acquainted with the general details of Montaigne’s life and writings. What is of more interest is what this essay reveals about Zweig’s mindset in the last winter of his life. This is very clearly a personal undertaking. Even though Zweig set about researching the social and political context in which Montaigne lived, the resulting work was never subjected to a judicious edit and, as it exists, it tends to be overly repetitive in some aspects, especially where Zweig’s enthusiasm runs high. He finds in Montaigne a friend, a wise counsel so desperately needed when his own despair at the state of the world is reaching an all time low and, as such, he is inclined to defend his friend against his critics even if his arguments tend to be based in emotion rather than reason. The only criticism he himself is willing to levy is with respect to his hero’s noted disregard for his children and the women in his life, and his desire to find refuge from their demands on his energies. Still, Montaigne’s withdrawal to his tower to contemplate the nature of the self – that is, the self that interests him most dearly: his own – is a choice that draws Zweig’s sympathy and support.

As a writer and a lifelong lover of literature and history, Zweig finds a like-minded ally in Montaigne. He admires the way that Montaigne engages with books. He reads without obligation or duty, choosing to discard books that are not working for him. As Zweig remarks:

“He is without doubt a serendipitous reader, an amateur reader, but there has never been, in his time or in any other, a finer or more perceptive reader. Concerning Montaigne’s judgement on books I am 100 per cent in accordance.”

Later he continues:

“The great lesson Montaigne receives from books is that reading, in its rich diversity, sharpens his faculty of judgement. It impels him to respond, to lend his own counsel. And this is why Montaigne tends to annotate his books, underlining passages and writing at the end the date on which he read them, or the impression that they made on him in that moment.”

It is hard to argue with this sentiment. Two lovers of books, passionate about reading are bound to feel instant kinship, even when reaching across time and space. For a man in exile, cut off from his intellectual community in Europe, it is not difficult to imagine that Zweig felt he had found a soul mate in Montaigne.

But then why was this bond, this example of a man so firmly dedicated to the question of how one should live, not sufficient to carry Zweig through his darkest hours? Montaigne is careful in his essays not to dictate how others should live. His focus is always turned inward. He shares what he finds and what he comes to believe he should strive for in living. Zweig draws up a list of the constraints that Montaigne expresses a desire to avoid including: vanity or pride, presumption, fear and hope, belief and superstition, ambition and avarice, fanatacism, and family and familiar surroundings. There is, however, one more:

“And one last freedom: in the face of death. Life hangs on the will of others, but death on our own will: ‘La plus volontaire mort c’est la plus belle.’”

That is, he insists, the most voluntary death is the most beautiful. If Zweig who was known to struggle with depression had already contemplated suicide (and according to the translator’s introduction he had expressed that sentiment before), one cannot help but wonder if he found some measure of validation in Montaigne’s writings.

This biography stands as an example of the deeply personal impact that literature can have on a reader. Zweig argues that there are writers who come to you, or come back to you, at the time when you are ready to hear them. This final work took precedence over any of this other writing projects in the months leading up to February 22, 1942, the day he and his wife each took an overdose of barbiturates and lay down together hand in hand. In a sense Montaigne exists as a final effort for a sensitive writer to make peace with a world that seemed to have spun off its axis. For that reason alone it is worth the read.

glm_v

Translated from the German by Will Stone, Montaigne by Stefan Zweig is a new released from Pushkin Books.

Listen closely now – The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard

[one love affair]

THIRTEEN INSTANCES OF LUNACY
TWENTY SURPRISES
FOUR DISAPPEARANCES
TWENTY-SIX MURDERS
TWO INSTANCES OF LIBEL
SIX PAINFUL DEATHS
THREE CHARACTER ATTACKS
FIVE EARLY DEATHS
ONE MEMORY LAPSE
FOUR COVER-UPS
EIGHTEEN SUICIDES

With the list above, the cover of the University of Chicago publication of The Voice Imitator offers a warning to the potential reader of the themes that feature in the 104 stories that lie ahead. For seasoned readers of Thomas Bernhard none are likely a surprise, though it is quite possible to emerge at the end thinking, “were there only 26 murders and 18 suicides?” Chances are it feels like there are more. But that’s okay. Would you really expect less?

VoiceIf the thought of encountering a volume containing 104 stories sounds intimidating, be assured that this collection spans all of 104 pages. This is Bernhard in microcosm, all of the acerbic wit and dark charm one could want from the Austrian playwright, poet and novelist distilled into brief anecdotal tales, each recounted within the space of one page.
The longest fill the page, the shortest are no more than a few lines.

Drawing on newspaper reports, rumour, and overheard conversations, Bernhard exploits this condensed form of fiction to tackle his favourite targets, including, of course, his native country. Even in a confined space, he finds room to explore the foibles of human nature and contemplate the bitter ironies of life. There is a healthy dose of death – murder, suicide, accident – some, tragic, some absurd; and no small measure of madness. Featuring a familiar retinue of philosophers and professors, craftsmen and woodcutters, musicians and artists, freaks and loners; the stars of these anecdotes and fables are driven by conviction, thwarted ambition, disillusion, and disappointment. Just like, well, the rest of us.

The least effective pieces are the very shortest. A few more lines are often in order to set the scene, to draw the drama, to pull the the punch. But even then, the emotional impact can be striking with less than half a page:

“Sitting in the early train, we happen to look out of the window just at the moment when we are passing the ravine into which our school group, with whom we had undertaken an excursion to the waterfall, had plunged fifteen years ago, and we think about how we were saved but the others were killed forever. The teacher who had been taking our group to the waterfall hanged herself immediately after a sentence of eight year’s imprisonment had been passed on her by the Salzburg Provincial Court. When the train passes the scene of the accident, we can hear our own cries intermingled with the cries of the whole group.”                        (Early Train)

The use of the first person plural in the majority of these stories lends an intimate tone. One can almost imagine the narrator as one of those inveterate storytellers who always has an entertaining morsel at hand: a family legend, a piece of wisdom, a mini tirade to share. Bernhard’s language plays on repetition, relies on qualifiers like “so-called” – one can almost see the air quotes – and, in this shortened format, he delights in throwing a punch at the end, leaving the reader with a gasp, a nod, or an ironic laugh.

Some might see this as an introduction to Bernhard for those uncomfortable diving into, say, a single-paragraph 200 page novel. But it works even better, one might argue, as a treat for those who are already acquainted with some of Bernhard’s classic works. Each little anecdotal story stands like a glimpse into the windows of Bernhard’s world… the themes, characters, and images that feature in his longer works shine, isolated for a moment, in the space of a single page or less. Contained in this way, his rhythm, his cynicism, and acerbic wit ring through. Bite-sized Bernhard to marvel at and enjoy.

glm_vThe Voice Imitator is translated by Kenneth J. Northcott. This stands as my first contribution for the German Literature Month reading challenge.

What no love can heal: Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

Harmattan: A cold-dry trade wind that blows across the West African subcontinent from the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea during the winter months bringing dust storms, low humidity and an increased risk of fire outbreaks. This is the trademark wind of the dry season.

dry-season-cover_54aff6fb99d92_250x800rAs Gabriela Babnik’s novel Dry Season opens, we find a 62 year-old Slovenian woman, Ana, lying in bed with a 27 year-old Bukinabé man, and it is immediately clear that her path to reclaim herself will defy conventions. But then, as we come to know her, we realize that she has long been resistant to the constraints of convention. Ana and the young man, Ismael, are not yet lovers, despite the fact that they awake in the same bed. Their first encounter is uncertain, tentative. Across the boundaries of age, race, class, and culture, they have been drawn to each other with their own dark histories lying twisted inside. As these two disparate individuals take turns addressing the reader – that is the most accurate way of describing the manner in which their stories are uncoiled – we gradually begin to learn more about their pasts and their feelings toward one another.

Ismael and his friend are targeting tourists to rob when he first spots Ana. He is drawn to her but does not see her as a potential mark; he does not sense that she is carrying much of monetary value. It is something else, though he is not entirely certain what that is. For Ana, her attraction to black men is rooted in an earlier time in her life: a chance encounter and subsequent affair with a Sudanese man that has left an unfilled and aching space in her memory. It is not clear that she knows, or is ready to confront, what she truly hopes this young man can heal in her:

“But this sleeping man in front of me was from another time. He had a god drawn on his face. I wanted to say that earlier but it slipped my mind. As I was walking toward him from the other side of the avenue, I felt a strong desire for him to touch the secret territory inside me. Ever since I gave birth thirty years ago, I knew I had to put it aside for a while. I mean touching the silky surface of blades of grass with my palm or licking honey slowly from a metal spoon and then looking at my face in it.”

Ana admits that she has literally walked out on her life in Ljubljana, a life she sees as reduced to the design of illustrated throw pillows, trapped an inherited house with a view of the garden. She is haunted by the suicide of her distant mother, the decline and end of her marriage, the return of her long absent father, and the descent into madness of her only child. Behind all of this is a persistent pain, a bitter groundlessness borne of the fact that she was adopted from an orphanage. It colours, perhaps even distorts, a sense of abandonment that no person, place or career can fill. Her escape to Africa is a deliberate attempt to fill this void.

As Ismael takes up his side of the narrative in turn, it becomes evident that these two unlikely lovers share some common demons. His father is unknown to him and this status defines him and his mother in the village in which they live. They are subject to open shaming and abuse until the day when they are finally rescued and removed to a longed for but equally uncertain life in the big city. They take up residence for a while with a man he calls Baba, and who becomes, over time, a sort of surrogate father whose albino son, Malik, will grow to be both a friend and a recklessly dangerous influence. But in the meantime, Ismael’s increasingly unstable mother will flee to the streets. Together they beg on the roadside and sleep under a bridge until his mother is suddenly killed when he is seven years old.

“Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around.”

Suspended between an aborted childhood and a tenuous adulthood, Ismael seeks to fill the mother-shaped hole in his life through several women who look after him for a time. He is eager, hungry to learn to read and write, but his opportunities are limited by his circumstances. He drifts back to the street scene, takes on odd jobs, works for a while fixing up old cars, and eventually falls into the pattern of robbing tourists with his friend Malik. Ana is, for him, a respite, possibly even a path out of a life marked by poverty, loneliness, neglect, and extreme brutality.

Dry Season is, in no small way, a sharp break from what one might expect from the literature of a small central European country. Eschewing a linear narrative and conventional storytelling, we are confronted with an unusual blend of metafictional devices – the fact that the action is occurring within the context of a novel is evoked repeatedly, as is a magical realism common in so much African literature, as a way of seeing and accepting ghosts and magic in the world. It is not the Balkan Wars but the tumultuous recent history of Burkina Faso that forms the critical political backdrop. Sex and sexuality are presented with an overt frankness, from the innocent masturbatory explorations of a young boy to the full fleshed desires and needs of a mature woman. Loneliness drives both Ana and Ismael to seek refuge in one another’s bodies, where they find, for a time at least, an intensely passionate release.

The open relationship between a white woman and a black man less than half her age does not go unnoticed on the streets of Ouagadougou. Ana, as the outsider, is forced to confront the reality of the African society against the mythology that has drawn her to the continent and into Ismael’s arms. Once the veil begins to drop in the aftermath of an attack on a cab in which they were riding, she says:

“I was wrong about you, Ismael. I thought you were a quiet, withdrawn fellow, who still walks in a world of timelessness, of gods, of moral certainties and natural laws, and even such constraints as religion and gender, but now I see you are one of them, one of the bandits.”

He counters:

“I am not what you think. I am a man who walks on a reddish road, the man you saw from the cab. I saw you seeing him. You thought, how backward they are, poor things, they learn on the ground, make love on the ground, eat off the ground, but that ground, that earth, which you take in your hand and let crumble through your fingers, it is all we have.”

She finds herself relying on the assistance of street children, who in turn taunt and mock her. She depends so closely on Ismael to be her guide and protector that she easily loses her way in his absence. The risks that they both ultimately face are significant and potentially devastating. There is no escape to a magical wonderland. Especially when the true trauma, the denied reality, lies inside rather than outside of the person longing to escape.

This novel is a demanding and startlingly rewarding read. Both Ana and Ismael have stories that they urgently need to share, that are weighing them down. Both stories contain hidden corners that must be turned, secrets that are difficult to bear. The narrative threads move back and forth in time, building on past experiences repeatedly to flesh out more detail. The novel that is being created in the present moment, if you will, becomes a space of self-examination and revelation for the two narrators. The separate strands become entwined, creating the effect of a tightly braided cord that then begins to fray as the relationship falls apart. The magic fades but the telling grows increasingly surreal, leading up to an exhilarating and shocking revelation in the final pages.

Another stunning release from UK-based Istros Books, Dry Season will be released on November 16, 2015.

This review has been posted on the blog of the Free Word Centre in London.

In partnership with Istros Books, the Free Word Centre is hosting an evening with Gabriela Babnik and translator Rawley Grau on Monday, November 9, 2015. See details here.

Life in a company town: Arvida by Samuel Archibald

You could almost envision Arvida as a town constructed as a backdrop, like a movie set, just waiting to be called upon by a talented story teller; one who would pull and draw legends, myths, and memories out of the woodwork of his hometown and re-imagine them, use them as fuel for his creative fire – a writer like Samuel Archibald. And you would not be that far off. Arvida was, in truth, a company town, founded in 1927 on the banks on the Saguenay River, 240 km north of Quebec City. Archibald describes the town’s genesis as follows:

“The Americans built the town beside the aluminum smelter in a hundred and thirty-five days. There’d been nothing around for 200 million years, then there was the Alcan smelter, and a hundred and thirty-five days later, a town.”

A town with no history suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere was a haven for those with a past to escape, those who wanted to forget or be forgotten… “a town of second chances”.

arvidaBy the time that Archibald was born 1978, Arvida had been fused with the town of Jonquière and today a number of smaller communities have been amalgamated to form the city of Sanguenay. Arvida, as separate entity, the model town once praised by the New York Times no longer exists as such. But its glory days, its decline, its humanity – and a measure of misguided inhumanity – provide a wealth of inspiration for the stories that make up Arvida, Archibald’s short story collection first published in French in 2011, and now available in English translation. It has been shortlisted for the 2015 Giller Prize.

On the back cover of this book, Samuel Archibald is compared to a “Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy”. Stir in a nod to Stephen King and it is not an inaccurate billing. There is a dark heart throbbing throughout these stories, a pulse that binds them together, weaving often disparate tales into a surprisingly coherent and effective whole.

The series is bookended by the first and third parts of the “Arvida” story: “My Father and Proust” and “Madeleines”. Together with “The Centre of Leisure and Forgetfulness” (Arvida II) which appears about two thirds of the way through, we have a fictional glimpse of the author, his family, and his hometown. Funny, sad, and philosophical, this tripartite tale begins with humorous accounts of the narrator’s father’s boyhood penchant for stealing pastries and ends with the challenge of facing Proust’s madeleines armed only with the memory of McNuggets, anchored in the middle with a celebration of the spirit and fortitude of his grandparents and the characters that brighten small town life at its best.

Many of the stories that fill out the collection are decidedly darker. Blood and violence are not unknown. But then neither are dreams and a spirit of magic. “Cryptozoology” features a father and son who live between dream and waking life without holding one as more valid than the other. Sharing a cabin in the woods, 13 year-old Jim is essentially his hard-drinking father’s care taker, driving him home from social gatherings, and cleaning and sobering him up the morning after. On the road and along the traplines he is haunted by sightings of an elusive animal, perhaps a cougar, that cross into his sleeping hours and take on an increasingly mythical significance as Jim himself becomes ill.

“Now Jim is dreaming and listening. He hears what they’re saying about him. He’d like to reassure them, to explain to them. He often has a dream with no up nor down, where the beast attacks him and devours him. It’s a dream of carnivorousness and violence, but not of death. He does not expire while the cougar is annihilating his body, he fossilizes within the animal like a memory of flesh.”

Ghosts are also a featured presence in Arvida, from the old fashioned gothic horror of “A Mirror in the Mirror”, the tale of a woman who wastes away into a state of otherworldliness waiting for her playwright husband to return from an extended stay in Montreal; to the spirits, real or imagined, that haunt and ultimately destroy the family life of a man who takes on the restoration of a crumbling historic mansion. But the horror theme is taken to an extreme in “Jigai”, a gruesome fantastical tale of ritual mutilation set in Japan, safely across the globe from small town Quebec. It is apparently an allegory of an unimaginably brutal story Archibald heard when he was growing up. Placing it in the middle of this collection however, has the effect of providing a powerful counter point to the small moments and the everyday terrors, fears, and passions of life in a remote community.

The fictional Arvida is inhabited by a wide assortment of colourful, often hapless, indiviuals. For example, in “América”, for the promise of three thousand dollars, a pair of young men decide to accept the challenge of smuggling a woman from Costa Rica into the United States. First they enlist a cokehead as an accomplice who turns out to be little more than a burden that must be abandoned, and then neglect to consider the impact that the events of September 2001 will have on their attempt to cross the border in 2002. Later on in another story, “The Last-Born”, a man who is less than a deep thinker, decides he can kill a man, again for a couple thousand dollars. Yet what starts out as attempted murder, turns into an unexpectedly heartwarming tale. Archibald is sensitive to the complicated dynamics of human interaction, allowing his characters to find their own ways in to and, with luck, out of trouble.

Arvida was very well received in Quebec. Archibald worked with translator Donald Winkler for a year to realize the work in English. Hopefully the Giller nomination will serve to introduce him to a wider audience, and to provide a well deserved boost for his small publisher, Biblioasis, who had three titles on the long list this year, two moving on to the short list. The stories in Arvida may be inspired by a particular place, but they vividly evoke the reality of small town Canadian life, especially in the 1960’s and 70’s. They could be set in any number of communities across the country, especially those company towns that rose up around mining or pulp and paper factories. Some, like Arvida have been absorbed into larger centres, while others are fading away.

A delicate exposition of the everyday: Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

“New Year’s Day on the sofa. I folded my life in on itself, seven times. The last few folds only bent. I was surprised it was so bulky.”

The cover of the book is simple. Pale yellow lettering across the horizon that separates a gray sky from the gray waters below. Vertigo. Joanna Walsh. Inside fourteen stories, elemental evocations of a woman’s existence, from the gently dissected vantage point of early mid-life, rolling out, reflecting back on one another, like waves lapping up against the shore. Emerging from the waters as the book draws to close, it is difficult to find words to encapsulate the experience of encountering this work.

vertigoThroughout this spare collection, Walsh demonstrates a stunning ability to pinpoint the imperceptible, bring it to the surface and spin a story around it. Her narrators, who may or may not all be the same woman, perseverate, observe, double check and doubt themselves. They are acutely aware of their bodies: bodies that are aging. They are aware of their clothes, of how their clothes fit, how they arrange their legs, if the man at the next table has noticed their legs. They turn their focus inward to the very act of breathing – in, out, or barely breathing at all. They are mothers, they are wives, they are ex-wives, they are daughters. Perspectives shift, sometimes even within the frame of the same story.

“I say ‘you’. Of course I mean ‘me’.”

The title story, “Vertigo”, is the account of a family vacation. The narrator, her husband and children have travelled to an unnamed country to spend as little money as possible, time is the currency of the holiday. Vertigo, she tells us, is “the sense that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space.” The drive up the mountain to their guesthouse with a drop off to one side of the road is the worst. During the day the family visits a tourist site, ruins where the temptation arises to remove a stone or even a piece of the rubble from the original structure. This stirs anxieties the woman recognizes as echoes of her mother rising through her and creating conflict with her own role now as mother to her children. Meditative, her thoughts roam with the sun drenched unanchored processing that we often fall into when removed from the routine of ordinary life. It feels as if Walsh has simply opened her hands to capture her character’s reflections and spilled them gently across the page. It is almost impossible to pinpoint how it works, but it does.

The minute attention to the inner moment, pared down to its most essential, is the quality that sets these stories apart. The conscious detachment of the self from the body of the mother waiting in the hospital while her son undergoes surgery in “The Children’s Ward” is especially poignant and will ring true for any parent who has placed their emotions on hold, not daring to think too much about possibilities, waiting, just waiting, distracting oneself with mind games when the brain will often not even distract itself with a book or magazine. Waiting for Charlotte (whoever Charlotte is, she does not know) to update her, the mother wonders:

“If Charlotte comes with her words comes to tell me it all went wrong how would my body know it? How long before the parts of my body realized, independently, that something was wrong and arrived, severally, at panic? Panic is still a thing. I have felt it before: each limb nerve organ coming into extreme alert unrelated to any other, ready for action, but who knows what action, as there is no action that could help here.”

Many pieces are very short, prose pieces rather than stories perhaps, each finely honed. The voices are wryly observant, tuned in to an inner monologue that mediates between the self and the self in the world. One becomes ensnared in the mesh of words, even in the simplest of stories. In “Relativity” a woman is traveling by bus to see her mother. She compares herself to her teenage daughter beside her and to the other women on the bus:

“Among other middle-aged women I don’t look too neat, and this pleases me.

I am dressed for, what? For anything that might happen to me: keep it coming! I’ve learned that it does. I am dressed for things that are not. I am not too sexy, not too casual, not too unassumingly unassuming. I do not look like I have made an effort, but I do look like I might have made an effort to look like I have not made an effort, which is only polite. And I will not fall over if required to run in my shoes.”

I don’t want to say too much about the individual stories here. They are best encountered on their own terms. This is a book that invites a slow reading. It is not long, or difficult. But you want to savour each piece. This is fiction infused with fine imagery, charged with an electric current, shockingly alive to new possibilities of rendering the mundane exquisite. If you are not watchful it could leave you with a sense of vertigo.

Or maybe that is the goal.

Vertigo is published by the Dorothy Project in North America. The UK edition will be released by And Other Stories in 2016.

The heartbreak of a parent’s love: Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi

“How children suffer for their parents, and parents for their children.”

The setting is Sárszeg, a fictional Hungarian town at the turn of the twentieth century, a nondescript dusty community with one black topped road and its own illusions of class and society aspirations – a fine restaurant, a theatre and a gentleman’s club – but for anyone with eyes on true cosmopolitan existence it is but a provincial backwater. To the Vajkays, Ákos, his wife, and his daughter Skylark, it is home. They live quietly, increasingly keeping to themselves over the years. Father has taken an early retirement for health reasons and spends his days pouring over historical volumes, tracing out family trees and studying heraldry. Mother tends house with the assistance, or perhaps under the direction, of her daughter, who, at age 35, can safely be considered a spinster beyond the faintest chance of any marriage prospects.skylark

Unfolding with the feeling, at least on the surface, of a gentle fable, this short novel by Hungarian author Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936) covers the span of one week in the lives of the Vajkay family. At the outset Mother and Father (and that is what they are most frequently called) are diligently cramming everything their beloved daughter may reasonably require into an old suitcase in preparation for her visit to her aunt and uncle in the country. The week that she will be away is the longest that they have ever been parted.

As the train carries Skylark away, her parents stand on the platform, rather numb and bereft. How will they make it through the long days ahead? They have always been a unit though, truth be told, fate, not choice has rendered the situation thus. The couple had long since discarded the serious hope that their homely daughter would secure a suitor. Only the vaguest flickers remained and they did not burn bright. And that fact bound them to her ever more closely with each passing year:

“Skylark was a good girl, Ákos would often say, to himself as much as anyone else. A very good girl, his only pride and joy.

He knew she was not pretty, poor thing, and for a long time this had cut him to the quick. Later he began to see her less clearly, her image gradually blurring in a dull and numbing fog. Without really thinking any more, he loved her as she was, loved her boundlessly.”

Skylark’s absence in their home is felt acutely at first. The hollowness weighs in on her parents. Having decided to eat out while their primary cook is away, the couple (referred to as “elderly” though they are only in their late 50s) reluctantly take themselves off to the King of Hungary, the restaurant their daughter has assured them is passable if less than desirable on all counts. It was the best option. Cultivating condescending opinions of almost any aspect of community life was a popular Vajkay family pastime – a practice that achieved little more than to assure their social isolation. Yet, away from Skylark’s influence, Father is soon delighting in the restaurant’s gastronomic offerings, reconnecting with his circle of old friends, and even enjoying a little alcohol and a cigar after a lengthy period of health related abstinence. Their resurfacing in public does not go by unnoticed:

“Strangers turned to look at them as they passed. Not that there was anything unusual about their appearance. People simply weren’t accustomed to seeing them there in the street, like old couches that belong in the living room and look so strange when, once or twice a year, they’re put outside to air.”

Soon the couple is invited to the theatre, Mother buys a crocodile handbag for the occasion and together they are warmly welcomed back into the life of the town. The flurry of excitement they experience, freed from the strict influence of their daughter, surprises them both. But when Ákos returns from his triumphant re-appearance at the local gentlemen’s club’s regular Thursday night dinner obnoxiously intoxicated, Mother and Father are forced to confront an ugly suspicion that both have harboured but neither has dared to speak: Do they still love their daughter? Or has pity has matured into hate? The tension that builds from that point forward takes a sharp twist the following evening when Skylark’s train is greatly delayed.

Filled with a cast of eccentric secondary characters, and fueled by a mildly sarcastic humour, Skylark is tale is told in a highly entertaining, direct manner that moves at a strong, steady pace to a simple yet heartrending conclusion. This is a fundamentally human story. At its core is a poignant truth that each member of this small family carries in his or her own way – a deep sadness that holds them together and defines them in their world.

kosztolanyi2Published in 1924, Skylark was Kosztolányi’s third novel. He started out as a journalist before turning to poetry and then fiction. He was also an important critic and translator and, in 1931, he served as the first president of the Hungarian PEN Club.

1924-ClubThis NYRB edition features an extensive introduction by Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy which not only details the author’s life but examines the significant impact he had on the Hungarian language itself. The translator of the text and introduction is Richard Aczel.

The illusion of reality: A Dream of Horses & Other Stories by Aashish Kaul

“A book is an enigma. Words that fill its pages present a shifty, relative universe. Through a reader, they create constructs where the past attempts to meet the future, the present arranging the meeting. In this present, as the reader receives and breaks apart the text – revives the past, contemplates the future – he, unknowingly merges the two and makes the present fluid, expansive, eternal: he defeats time.”

If the author’s medium is words – words strung together to hold a story until it can be read and unleashed by the reader, the reader who ventures into A Dream of Horses & Other Stories by Aashish Kaul is well advised to be prepared to follow those words on the paths they take, the forks they chose to follow, and the dreamscapes they uncover. And, if I advise said reader that they will emerge, in the final tale, on a boat on a lake listening in, no, almost absorbing, an imagined conversation between Jorge Louis Borges and Samuel Beckett, would that offer an indication of the journey in store? It should, but take that as an enticement. This is magical book. A magical book that celebrates the magic of books and traces the joys and heartaches that are bound to the process of translating the imagination into words on the page.

dreamhorsesThis slender collection of seven stories begins with two short tales, a parable about an archer who embarks on what starts out as way to occupy down time between periods of war, and becomes a mystical quest for knowledge; and a fable of sorts about a young child soldier, who wrenched from the opportunity to continue his education, finds himself ready to kill or be killed for the sake of a book. These stories follow a traditional, almost ancient form of storytelling. But from that point on, the influence of the two literary masters whom we will eventually meet on the boat mentioned above begins to infiltrate and inform the narrators, all writers themselves, who will carry us through the remaining tales.

In his enthusiastic introduction to this volume, Scott Esposito describes this collection as “seven dreams that Aashish Kaul has persuaded us to take for reality” but, as we discover, even the narrators often have a difficult time separating dream from reality in their own existences, creating a shifting maze, or labyrinth that must be negotiated. In the end the reader (and the narrator) can do little more than surrender to this blurred line between truth and imagination, and the experience of fiction is laid bare as an act of the suspension of disbelief.

The longer stories that form the centrepiece of this collection highlight Kaul’s ability to create dreamlike environments – landscapes or cityscapes – that contain and unfold for his characters as needed. The natural settings are typically isolated, atop mountains, amid pine forests or in desolate dry locations. Several stories take place, at least in part, in Paris, a ceaselessly romantic backdrop with bridges, wrought iron railings, gardens and the looming structure of the Eiffel Tour. The former become settings of solitude and refuge from the noise, intensity and heartache of the city. Time functions on different measures in different places, compresses or expands, hanging most heavily over the writer who fears he has lost his voice.

In “The Light Ascending”, a writer who is suffering from a creative block, finds himself retracing his steps daily along paths leading from the Institute where he is staying through forests and up hills, seeking answers, inspiration, a clue to the path he should follow. The one book he has published to date had the primary benefit of connecting him with the famed, but elusive writer “JC”. One night, drawn into the woods by the sound of a flute playing he will lose his way and discover that he is “in a dream, mine or another’s, I can’t tell.” He will find himself in a cottage engaged in a most unusual game of chess with JC himself – a game in which he is compelled to begin naming the pieces: Borges, Joyce, Faulkner… Beckett. As his blockage lifts, he is overwhelmed by the enormity of what he has come to realize about his chosen craft.

There is a melancholy chord that sounds throughout these pages. The question of capturing the moment and transmitting it in the written form becomes a philosophical question and a practical concern for several of the narrators. In the title story “A Dream of Horses” and the longest entry, “Tahiti”, our authors each have a story to tell inspired, no compelled, by a lost romantic experience. In the former story, the narrator is recovering from a long illness during which he was simply unable to write. He wants to recapture a particular autumn in his life, but reflects that we “breathe in the present, but are alive only in retrospect, in a time long lost to that treacherous monster: memory.” How then to do justice to this moment in time? When he finally feels up to the task, he finds that the effort is draining:

“How easily I tire. How difficult it seems to move your pen to shape words, sentences, stories. It has become a labour, a mere physical activity. And yet, I have not written, no scribbled, more than a handful of lines. So much the better to roll out words and sentences in your memory, where they float calmly and because they are formless always retain some element of the truth.”

And here he turns, as if abandoning the pen, to address directly the woman whom he met that autumn. In second person, he is able to unfold the story he wants to tell from her perspective. By the end we see why this is the only sensible way to attempt to tell the truth of what lies ahead.

“Tahiti” also involves a writer with a woman from his past who has returned to haunt his imagination. As the story opens he has sought respite from city life in an unnamed Asian country where he has come to live in a compound high atop a mountain. Here he discovers a library perched on the edge of a precipice over a deep ravine tended by a nearly blind librarian who knows and recognizes every volume on the shelves. In this environment our writer is able to rekindle an energy for writing through his conversations with the librarian and the books he borrows. Woven against this narrative is the story of his love affair with the enigmatic woman who calls herself Tahiti. As he moves back and forth in his story, the boundaries between reality and dreams – or rather, the realistic and the fantastic – begin to blur, raising the question whether a narrator is in control of the story he tells or subject to lose his own grounding in reality, whatever that is, before the tale is over.

For the reader of A Dream of Horses & Other Stories, the lines are so subtly shifted and so evocatively rendered that the sensation, as the last story draws to a close, is one of a renewed appreciation for the power of words and the books that contain them to inform, transform, and entertain. The imagined encounter between Borges and Beckett that rounds off the collection is followed with a brief essay in which Kaul compares the two writers, drawing the parallels that he sees in their work. This concluding piece nicely places into perspective much of the imagery and ideas encountered in the preceding work and brings this book to a satisfying conclusion, leaving the reader free to explore his or her own dreams. Maybe even those dreams that are calling to be put into words.

Born in New Dehli, Aashish Kaul presently lives in Sydney, Australia. A Dream of Horses & Other Stories was published in 2014 by Roundfire Books.