Category Archives: Fiction and Hybrid Prose

Dubravka Ugrešić

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I am sad to learn the news of Dubravka Ugrešić’s death. Her fiction is always surprising and often moving. I wrote about her brilliant novel, The Ministry of Pain, which explores the power of memory along with the mercy of forgetting.

Ugrešić lived in exile both in the US and Europe after her home country, Yugoslavia, fell apart and became Croatia. Uncompromising and insightful, she criticized not only Croatia’s nationalism but also the US’s consumerism and superficiality. She consistently examined the seemingly well-meaning individual to reveal how political and social circumstances affect the spirit and mind.

For a 2018 article in The New Yorker, Christopher Byrd spoke with Ugrešić, who was in the US to promote her collection of essays, American Fictionary. Ugrešić’ compared the then-President of the United States, Donald Trump, to the leadership in her broken home country in the wake of war. Invoking an immense world at the mercy of bad leaders, Ugrešić’ said of Trump: “He’s showing vividly that something is wrong with all of us, if we are able to have such leaders.” She went on to say of her “poor Yugoslavia”: “It had the most stupid leaders you can imagine.” Such leaders, she told Byrd, “just eat these countries like chocolate.”

Update April 10: Lit Hub has published wonderful remembrances of Ugrešić’ by five translators of her work, Celia Hawkesworth, Mark Thompson, David Williams, Vlad Beronja, and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who offers an introduction to this “expatriate citizen of the Republic of World Letters.”

Lettie from the Ocean

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Update: To view the piece below, please go to the site, Lettie from the Ocean.

Now up at Drunken Boat is my interactive media piece, “Lettie from the Ocean,” which features images from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The piece, which author and editor Darren DeFrain kindly mentions in his introduction, is a work of fan fiction for Neil Gaimen’s novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Lettie Hempstock at the Bottom of the Ocean

Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes

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My review of Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes is in the new print issue of Rain Taxi. The review begins:

The narrator of With My Dog-Eyes – a mathematician, Amós Kéres – turns the pronoun “I” into a variable. He then turns into an alpha – or to describe the transformation in all its beauty and horror, he enters the equation: “Amós = α.” Brazilian Hilda Hilst shows Amós fighting the sort of delusional magic that leads him to make equations out of his identity. He sees the magic of his own mind, which blends math and poetry, as a part of his nature. As he states in the poem that opens Hilst’s genre-defying work:

I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.

To buy the issue, go here.

Story in “Debt Folio” of Drunken Boat

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A story of mine appears in a section of the new issue of Drunken Boat. The section, “Debt Folio,” was edited by poet Michelle Chan Brown, and the story, “They Won’t Take Your Ideas,” has a plot that owes much to indebtedness. Here’s the premise:

But we mustn’t indulge in summer ourselves. This winter we got into debt. A medical bill paid through a credit service has become so expensive that we get sick thinking of it—so we try not to. We just keep in mind that we must pay it before winter. If we don’t, we’ll have to move to someplace less expensive.

For the full story with audio recording, go here.

Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold at Rain Taxi

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Now up at Rain Taxi is my review of Kate Bernheimer’s newest book:

Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold—the last novel in her trilogy about three sisters—makes for an unusually happy ending. Lucy, the most cheerful of the Golds, steps forward to recount her life and untimely death. Her novel, like the others in the trilogy, draws upon traditions of the fairy tale. “Dearest robins, my precious friends!” Lucy exclaims while recalling a time she lived in the woods. “Did you ever love something so much you just wanted to eat it?” Her joy is so strong that it shatters and erases. In the breaks and blanks it leaves behind comes a sense of Lucy’s isolation.

For the full review, go here.

cream city review Contest Story

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This spring I learned the wonderful news that my short story, “The Half-Glass Bed,” had won Cream City Review A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize. The story, selected by judge Vanessa Hua, appears in the current issue.  Here’s a selection from the piece, which touches upon the subjects of Lyme disease, mathematical chaos, the restaurant business, and Disneyland:

Mark’s gaze is bright when she goes to the bar to talk to him.  He is in his twenties but looks like a teenager.  His features are boyishly rounded.  When Daphne, who is thirty-one, tries to imagine him aging, his face pushes back against her efforts.  He tells her about his thumb, a squarish thing.  It resembles a toe, and it turns out that it was a toe.  An accident cost him his original thumb.  He must have been a cared-for child because, while speaking of this accident, he betrays no bitterness.  Maybe he received much attention from the grandma who, when he was a boy, took him to Florida to a theme park.  She drove him there as a treat that he had looked forward to all summer.  He knew all the characters at the park and was excited to meet them: the duck with the speech impediment, the affable mouse.  But what he wanted to do most was to go on a ride with mechanical pirates in caves. 

Soon his turn came on this water ride.  When he sat in the boat, he gripped the back edge of his seat as if he were about to jump up at any moment.  His elbow was sticking out, and his fingers were inside the boat, his thumb outside.  He was in the back of the ride in the last boat with his grandma, but he could hear a voice up ahead.  A pirate was telling him to hold on tight.  They were going down into the cave where there were more pirates.  Pretty soon he would see all of them.  The boat was moving into a waterfall, but before they could get there, he felt pain in his hand.  The pain was too strong to believe.  Lifting his hand from the boat’s edge, he thought:  But I’m not hurt.

To purchase the issue, go here.

Inger Frimansson’s Good Night, My Darling

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I first heard of Good Night, My Darling by Swedish author Inger Frimansson through Small Press Distribution. At the S.P.D. site, a listing for the recently translated novel says that Frimansson “is considered by many to be Sweden’s premier author of the psychological thriller.” As a longtime fan of one of the masters of this genre, Patricia Highsmith, I couldn’t resist getting the book, and, as it turns out, the novel evokes Highsmith when it comes to the consciousness of its killer.

Highsmith famously created murderers who seem normal rather than overtly troubled. The violence always makes good sense from the killer’s point of view. One can understand, for instance, why Vic Van Allen — small-press publisher and snail-enthusiast from Highsmith’s novel Deep Water — drowns the man who has been sleeping with his wife. The two men are in a pool so the water is handy. Vic has been watching his wife cheat on him for a long time, and his method of coping — looking at the situation with a sense of irony that creeps like a snail — only aggravates his disgust.

In Good Night, My Darling, Frimansson gives us a protagonist as oddly passive as Vic. An heiress to a candy fortune, Justine Dalvig has an air of desperate sweetness that doesn’t serve her well as a child. When girls at school bully her, she plies them with candy, which only encourages them in their vicious behavior. While trying to escape their cruelty one afternoon, she ends up breaking an ankle and yet still isn’t angry. Frimansson describes Justine’s reaction to the cast on her leg in the stark style found throughout the novel: “Her leg was put in a cast that reached up to her knee. She felt heavy and happy.”

Justine’s ankle continues to cause her problems as an adult. In the opening of the novel, she is struggling with this old injury and other hidden psychological ones. The narrative is layered with several points of view, including that of Flora, the stepmother who abused Justine as a child. Slowly, as the various characters sift through their memories, Justine’s difficult past comes into view. Frimansson portrays all of these characters, including Flora, with insightful sympathy. As a young bride, Flora tries to win over her new stepdaughter with a present — “a very nice doll, one that she herself would have wanted when she was a girl.” When Justine rejects the offering, the vain, pretty Flora, who often is described in doll-like terms — her eyes are “porcelain”; her husband calls her “my little doll” — takes the rejection so personally that she begins to beat the child.

By the time the first murder takes place, moral lines have been blurred so much that killing seems perfectly normal. The conditions are just right, the weapon on hand and easy to use. The motive is as solid from a psychological point of view as frustrated Vic Van Allen’s is when he holds his rival’s head under the pool. With her layered approach, Frimansson achieves one of the hardest goals of fiction: to make the plot seem like the inevitable result of both events and numerous choices shaped, in part, by character.

Where the book falters has to do with gender. Women tend to reach for poison when they kill, not just because, as a group, they spend more time in the kitchen than homicidal men. They also don’t have as much upper-body strength. Not many women, even if pumped up on a heavy dose of adrenaline and malice, would attempt some of the feats that Frimansson ascribes to a female character. Some of the violence in the last third of the book is improbably athletic. In fact, in a couple of places, the killing would come off as ridiculous were it not so tastefully described.

But here is just one suspicious stain on an otherwise wonderful thriller. I recommend the book to anyone as great reading for the holidays. This new English translation put out by Pleasure Boat Studio has a picture on the cover of a sweet young woman and a bird. (Justine has a large bird, rescued from the wild, as a pet.) With its innocent cover, the book provides a great place to hide for the holiday traveler. Instead of getting upset about delayed planes or family conflicts, just open the pages and watch the bodies pile up.

Originally posted on 12.25.2008

A Scrooge Plan Growing in July

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After much consideration about how best to sell out, I have decided to become a propagandist for the Raw Foods Movement. I know about the movement, being a “raw foodist.” (That is what we call ourselves.) I can sprinkle my fictional scenes with details that show how a diet of uncooked food dramatically improves health. But how can I make money off my convincing propaganda? This question has sent me to an unlikely place: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Reworking Dickens’ novella, I have created a story that promotes the eating of raw foods while reinforcing the values of the rich. Through the story, which I am offering for free on this website, I want to attract the attention of wealthy raw foodists. Some famous ones include Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Carol Alt. The diet generally enjoys more popularity on the West Coast than it does here in the East, probably because of the warmer weather. Cold food seems like a cruel way to go on a snowy night. Also the diet ran into an image problem in New York when one of its proponents and chefs, Dan Hoyt, got caught masturbating on the R train. Surely the raw food way of life could use some good press for the sake of its spas and retreats. I am hoping that a holistic businessperson will find his way to my work and ask me to create more propaganda for the cause.

While I am reluctant to give away my work for free, I am as desperate as author Dubravka Ugresic was a few years back when she offered to put a Miele vacuum cleaner in one of her novels for a price. The offer appeared in 2003 in her collection of essays Thank You for Not Reading. While stating her case, she gave a mini endorsement when she called Miele “the Mercedes of household appliances.” I assume that she received no compensation for the phrase.

I would offer to do product placement myself but want to give more. I must give more. My diet costs a lot, what with all of the produce and the shopping trips. Produce after all has a mere blip of a shelf life compared to pasta and jarred sauce. Furthermore, conditions for fiction writers have declined since Ugresic made her pitch. Recently I read Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity and learned of how creative artists are selling out for next to nothing these days. Some product placement here and there won’t cut it in today’s market. Anyway, a few fruits and vegetables thrown around a story would be more messy than illustrative and persuasive; truly I have picked a movement that requires an elaborate sell.

And so without further ado, here is “A Raw Christmas,” a short, fresh story.

A Raw Christmas

The ghost of Jacob Marley enters the bedroom of his old business partner Scrooge. He shakes the chains he is wearing, having forged the links over a lifetime of usury.

Scrooge is bored with the ghost. Having the Mercedes of home entertainment centers [insert brand name here], he is accustomed to vivid illusions. His mind wanders. The poor, blah, blah, blah. The real poor people are in other countries – India, Africa. All of the “poor” in the U.S. are inexcusably fat.

But Scrooge pretends to care. He knows he is in A Christmas Carol. He prides himself on his self-awareness and believes that it — and not acts of generosity — will be his ultimate salvation.

Marley, obviously confusing Scrooge’s boredom with disbelief, says, “You don’t believe in me.”

Scrooge says the line Dickens wrote for him: “I don’t.”

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

Scrooge continues to try to stick to the script: “Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

After Marley leaves, Scrooge realizes that he messed up this line about the gravy and the grave. He forgot to say that Marley could also be “a fragment of an underdone potato.” His mistake ultimately leads him to raw foods. He comes to learn that Marley is not “underdone potato” but overdone. Those ghosts bothering him about 25 percent interest rates on student loans are indeed “more of gravy than of grave.” His digestion is seriously overtaxed from cooked foods.

Scrooge changes his diet and feels better right away. No longer is he bothered by ghosts or, for that matter, thoughts of his first wife. That self-righteous woman had a tongue like a knife when she got home from the soup kitchen. (“Of course you’ve figured out what story you’re in, genius! Your name is Ebenezer Scrooge!”) Now she is a distant memory. She is stuck among the bitter, worrying about “the poor,” while he has moved on. He is healing, his heart having so improved that Viagra is no longer contraindicated in his case.

Originally posted on 7.14.2008

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Not having much time to post here, I wanted to write something brief about Frankenstein, which I reread a few weeks ago. Midway through the book, I realized I had forgotten a major piece of the plot. I couldn’t remember what happens when the monster asks the scientist Frankenstein to make him a female companion. I knew the woman monster never gets completed, but I couldn’t remember why.

As the moment approached in the story for the female to come to life, I tried to guess why she never does. I told myself that it pertained to Frankenstein’s skills as a scientist. He doesn’t know how to make a woman even though he has tried his best to find out. He has traveled to England to learn about “some discoveries” that are “material” to his project. But in the end he doesn’t learn enough about the female form – or so I speculated as Frankenstein started to make a woman out of dead flesh.

Imagine my surprise when he starts to tear up this woman before he has finished. The male monster, who has come to check on Frankenstein’s progress, watches the body being destroyed. The hideous and lonely monster has been promised a mate, but Frankenstein goes back on his word: “I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.”

I was going to write about the sensation of reading this passage, of seeing my own amnesia while watching, like the monster, the half-formed female being ripped apart. But as I said before, I don’t have much time to spend on this blog entry. I am busy writing a manuscript right now, and the sensations I felt while reading the scene would take a while to describe. The feelings were as profoundly weird as the body that gave rise to them.

Which brings me to another point about this book that surprised me this time around: I forgot that Frankenstein builds the monster to a huge scale in the interest of finishing quickly. “As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionally large.” So in honor of Frankenstein, who learned the hard way about haste – his monster does get him in the end; I didn’t forget that part – I will end this comment here.

Originally posted on 5.22.2008