The Garden of Storytelling: Heiberg's Twitch

            The title story in Robert Wexelblatt's new collection of stories, "Heiberg's Twitch," builds on a classic story-telling arc. We're given a character with a problem, and a community with a different problem. How will these two dynamics interconnect? Our character could exist anywhere in the world, but his story places him (like most of us) in a very specific locale, in Heiberg's case an isolated harbor town. The particularities of that setting give the narrative its second pole: the locals' problem is that a great beast has chosen to crawl out of the ocean and die on their shore. Can the learned professor, who is understandably more concerned with the destiny that has come to him, tell them what it is?           

            A fair number of the involving and highly readable stories in this collection deal with facing a destiny, living with a problem, coming to terms with a limitation. Their resolutions involve

making peace with these problems, or simply learning to live with them and perhaps accepting them, seeing things as they are. Some protagonists in the kinds of stories we are all familiar with triumph decisively over their antagonists -- those stories tend toward fable. A couple of these are here, such as the tale of the likely peasant lad who saves his realm, and its people, from disaster.

            Altogether, "Heiberg's Twitch" offers an impressive variety of fictive flight paths with recognizable story arcs. Fables, father and son conflicts, artists with a crisis, characters with a personal problem, characters with a societal conflict.

            These stories also have a quality, almost rare today, of satisfying story structure; beginning middle end. They don't read, to put things another way, like fragments of something else, hybrids, genre-benders, cross-media experiments, openings with no ends in sight, 'meta-fictions,' flash fictions, parodies. They feel like stories; not like essays, memoirs, or experiments with form.  

            The worthy youth from a common background, for example, survives intrigue and other dangers in an imperial Chinese court to preserve peace in the empire, saving thousands of lives.

            In another ("Edith Fevrier") a seasoned veteran in his profession is confronted with a precocious amateur, an 11-year-old autodidact with an advanced vocabulary.

            An artist wins a big prize, but his real contest is a Freudian rivalry with his father. Harold Bloom might call this an "anxiety of influence" story.

             A son receives a puzzling gift from an otherwise unforthcoming father: a household god who lives in a cage attached to the wall. 

            Set in post-Cold War Germany, a classic con is practiced in the literary field ("Kafka's Pen").

            In an instance of the story based on a reversal of common expectations, a brilliant composer struggles to keep off a commercial success he fears would weaken his creative powers. How can he evade Mammon's attempt to give him a prize?

            A fable about tribalism and nationalism intriguingly titled "Mesopotamia" transpires in a setting with an Eastern European flavor. Borders may change, but the relationship between the state and the individual is ultimately the same. The story reminds me of Machiavelli's dictum, "But the world consists of nothing but ordinary people."

            A contrasting types story, "Two Poets" pits polarized temperaments. The success: worldly, charming, self-loving, corruptible. And the hermit: puritanical, solitary, rejecting the world's illusions along with its pleasures.What happens when the two meet?

            A female bildungsroman gives us an intelligent young woman whom life keeps forcing into limiting roles, including that of "Harmony," a voiceless symbol in a famous Greek play. This  story, "Eirene," strikes me as more expansive and novelistic than the foregoing pieces, with the kind of background build-up that could sustain a longer story. 

            The more expansive vein spills over into the collection's final pieces, which both satisfy in their current form but (to me, at least) suggest paths for further development.            

            A story titled "Ten-Minute Novel" (but will deliver more than a ten-minutes read) explores the kind of closely plotted, multiple point of view fiction we see in sequential TV or a movie screenplay, concluding with an ensemble action sequence.

            Even more provocative is the story of the dalliance of the photographer and the emerging writer, who use each other in a creative alliance. The big payoff here is Wexelblatt's skillful exploitation of an archetypal urban experience. Who (we ask ourselves) is that person sitting across the aisle on the subway? What is his or her story? Plenty of grist here for the emerging writer -- or, I suspect, any writer. The story ("Urbs Fabula Sine Argumentum Est") is a tour de force in character-sketching.

             Most daring of all, perhaps, is the concluding piece, "The Withdrawal of Wawanu," a tale set in the minds, societies, and rituals of people who we are not like us. In fact to them, the story tells us, we are not people at all; we are "demons." Can't risk spoilers by going any further here. 

            "Heiberg's Twitch" is the kind of collection that tells you the short story is alive and well. Can we (for instance) imagine a precocious kid who is not a brat -- less concerned with showing how smart he is than doing a good turn for his mother? This author can. A piece of my own heart remains stuck on the story of a failing professor and a symbolic twitch -- the kind of problem that only a gesture of kindness can relieve. 

(2016, Pelekinesis; available at http://www.pelekinesis.com/)

The Garden of Seasonal Verse: "These Fragile Lilacs"

     
      A happy morning in the Massachusetts snow. Up today I have three poems on a new (to me) poetry journal elegantly titled "These Fragile Lilacs." It's the second issue for these "lilacs," including many attractive blossoms (from what I've read so far), unlikely to fade. 
Included is my poem "Emergences" written early last spring. It begins:

 "Backyard traffic picking up
Big brown white-footed cat sniffing the exposed
branch of the arborvitae
as if snow had a smell
Does it smell like February, that aging catastrophe?
Like the day the hawk played tag with the cardinal?..." 

          Here is the link for "These Fragile Lilacs": http://www.thesefragilelilacspoetry.com/

         This winter has been a lot different from last winter's snow-athon, when I was writing that kind of poem in late March or early April. The heavier the winter, the more extravagantly revolutionary the spring. 
          However yesterday, the first real 'classic New England storm' of the winter dropped eight inches of very wet snow on the Boston area. So maybe the matter of springtime "Emergences" will start feeling timely again in a month or so. The great thing about winter is that it ends.  
          Since it's February, as I'm sure everyone is well aware, a new issue of "Verse-Virtual," the poetry journal that publishes fresh work every month, is up at verse-virtual.com. This one has work by 74 poets; quite a substantial package. Most literary journals publish twice year; some offer quarterly publications. 
         I have three poems in this issue, all on the theme of leadership. Each in a different voice. One very personal ("My Leader" -- guess who?); one a response to what I found an important and moving film ("Spotlight"); and one a rhymed, metered response to the takeover of federal land, formerly Indian land, in Oregon. 
         Here's how that last one ("Sacred Land") begins: 

They bring their guns to land we stole
From treaty's vow to make them whole
We little knew or cared to know
What crimes still darken white man's soul
          
(See  http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2016-february.html  )

The Garden of Fiction: A Killer Voice in 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

         It's hard to read a page of "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher," or even just a sentence or two, without realizing you're in the hands of one of the best writers of English around and one of the most original minds we're likely to come across anywhere. Just writing well, with the peculiar verve and intensity writers of literary fiction call "voice" may not all by itself be enough to write a memorable book, but it is a necessity.           
            Mantel has it in spades without ever trying to be "showy," or different, or strange, or just magnificently perceptive. All these qualities, and all the others you want to be there, appear in her writing, but just appear to show up naturally. In the opening story, realistic fiction about social conditions in grand tradition of English fiction, Mantel gives us an encounter between Indian servants in the UK rendered in spot-on UK-Indian English. We might wish the wealthy dysfunctional English family our female servant has recently escaped from were less predictably selfish, self-absorbed and lacking in humanity; or that the servant doesn't become victim to both their oppression and their abuse. But there you have it: the way things are. And here matters are narrated with the minute particulars and a nasty, revealing twist or two to set the tale apart from others of its kind. 
          In Saudi Arabia things are no better, but the victimhood is simply shared by all the female members of a rich, privileged class, both native and international, who are sentenced to doing nothing. Her treatment of childhood in the story called "Comma" is strange and compelling. The adults in the tale are no more important than an arrangement of stuffed chairs, but childhood at a certain point can feel like that, can't it? When you really dig into things, the way all the "voices" in all these tales can't help doing, nothing really is 'ordinary' or 'normal,' is it? 
          Certainly not the day spent indoors by what appears to be a respectable, comfortable English woman of a certain age, whose bedroom window just happens to offer the perfect angle for a rifle shot at the English P.M., emerging from a hospital across the way. Mantel is the author of "Wolf Hall," probably the most extraordinary piece of fiction produced this century. Yet, as these stories show, you don't have to serve the gigantic ego of an absolute monarch, or desire to spill the blood of a noxious contemporary pol, to be a subject of interest. 
          All you need is a pulse, a heart, something to think with, and the desire to survive even accidental encounters with your fellow creatures.

The Garden of Verse: Every Month New Blossoms

            Everything is completely different and yet somehow the same in Verse-Virtual. Like the weather: Every month a new shower of words. This year's mild winter leaves plenty of headroom for strong poems.

          Joan Colby provides a handful with a week of "good ideas." In a poem titled "ON THE THIRD DAY OF GOOD IDEAS" we learn about trees: 

"Consider the trees. How they gift/
The world with the oxygen of being." 

          Speaking as someone who considers trees a very good idea, I love the way this poem marshals its evidence without waste or sentimentality: an economy of apt phrases. What can be more important than "the oxygen of being"?              
          Another good idea, "Delight," hits the nail on the head: "Delight is spontaneous." 

          The poem fills us with happy recognitions: "On the morning of delight" -- yes, we think, delight comes in the morning and demands (as the poem tells us) a tango where "a pause/ Can fill the heart with sequins." 

           Books are also a good idea, even the last of these: 

"The book of farewells signed

By all the people come to witness."

          Barbara Crooker's tightly crafted poem "Surface" is an object lesson in turning an anecdote into poetry. All the imagery hangs together, so a poem on the meaning of surfaces, and our need to clothe them, becomes itself a wardrobe, an outfit: 

"I can’t remember her name, just how straight her hair was,/
how it hung down her back like a bolt of cloth. /
In the untidy closet of my heart, I think about what we put on..."

          A short month has neither world nor time to wander off before getting to the point. Firestone Feinberg's three wise poems amount to a kind of critical aesthetic: 

"Experience itself cannot be told, but/
it can be hinted at in some incarnations of art," 

he writes in "A Poem Perhaps." The lines illustrate their meaning: 

"This is one./ Consider it./ Be fair."

          Robert Wexelblatt's "Diva" uses another strategy of concision to hit the 'nail' on the head. Displeased by a newspaper review of her latest concert that singled out her performing while praising the entire troupe, the diva tears the offending page apart: 

She rends the newsprint with a long, red nail:
“My triumph’s hollow—unless others fail.”

With its zinger of a final couplet the poem resembles a satire by Alexander Pope, both apropos and inevitably a little comic. You can also read Diva-country as the opposite of the community carved out by Verse-Virtual. Triumphs everywhere, and a cultivated regard for the beauty found in the achievements of others.

            Sonia Greenfield offers a simply excellent gathering of poems under the heading of "Science Poems." The poems are filled with a brainy and beautiful metaphysics such as the notion weighed in "The Science of Poetry the Poetry of Science": 

Quantum theory posits parallel worlds
we sometimes press against
where we make different choices
and interact with our mirror selves, 

          I admit I'm prejudiced since I've been seduced by this speculation before. Is it a premise for a postmodern novel, or mere sci-fi, or an ethical injunction since our "mirror selves" may pop up anywhere, but in a guise we don't recognize? Greenfield's poem carries its thesis through a series of alert, wittily expressed transformation. We end up paying quick visits both to the now-proverbial two roads diverging in a wood and to "miles to go before we sleep." This is a poem that gives us both the road less traveled and, as she says, "the road well worn." A poem that illustrates its thesis by taking both choices.  

          In her poem "Fukushima Daisies," the notion of singularity, of variations in nature and humanity is celebrated. The accompanying photo of the post-nuclear daisy is indescribably apt. I would say the meaning of  this flower is indescribable too, but Greeinfield does it: 

... those radio-

active flowers, clustered

into misfit bouquets."

            These and many other fine poems are available at http://www.verse-virtual.com/ Click on 'current poetry.' Than click on a poet's name.

The Garden of Well-Told Tales: "Foe," voiced by J.M. Coetzee

           A recent discussion on Goodreads.com, an online network for readers and writers, raised the question: What constitutes "literary fiction"? No one's pretending to give a simple answer, but a participant nominated "James" (the site does not permit full names), raised a number of good points. I wish to address just one of them, his emphasis on 'voice' in literary fiction.
           Though I can't fully credit him, knowing only a first name, James mentioned voice twice:
"In literary fiction, anything goes, the author can freely experiment with voice and style... [and] Character (or voice) usually comes before plot."
And in another statement he makes a similar argument:  
"The words and style tend to make it a pleasure to read (as opposed to, say, an action driven page turner, where the action makes it a pleasure to read)."
            I have recently read three short works of fiction that I see as exemplifying the essential virtue of a strong narrative voice.
"Foe" by J. M. Coetzee; "The Meursault Investigation" by Kamel Daoud; and "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" by Hilary Mantel. In each of these books stories are told by a narrator who buttonholes our attention from the book's first words and holds it to the last. 
           Here, for example, is "Foe"'s narrator, the ship-wrecked Susan Barton appealing to the author of "Robinson Cruso" to tell her story: ''The island was Cruso's (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty."
         Ah, we think, here is someone worth listening to. 
         In this excerpt passage from Coetzee's short novel, chosen pretty much by random, the reader may register impressions such as...:
          Well, we are indeed in the early the 18th century, in which long sentence of relatively complicated structure are routine. Long-windedness is not the mortal sin to the readers and writers of that period that it is today for the terser style readers expect and most writers of English deliver. Today, a college English composition teacher (I used to be one) would say, 'Whoops, you've got a run-on sentence here, right after 'but i lived there too.' You can't just put a comma there and go straight into another independent clause.' 
          Looking at this sentence today, I would have to ask 'why did we bother about such stuff?' Susan Barton's so-called run-on sentence presents no barrier to reader comprehension. In fact the comma, rather than the full-stop period, emphasizes the rising momentum of Barton's surging argument. 
           And no newspaper editor would allow Barton to follow 'bird of passage' with two examples of exactly that sort of bird: 'no gannet or albatross.' Stick to the essential facts, our news writers would be told. But anyone reading Barton's (that is, of course, Coatzee's) prose with an ear for the joy of language finds pleasure in hearing those precisely chosen names. Those are the (phonetically interesting) names of two kinds of birds who do fly lengthy passages over the blue Pacific to island hop and check out the local food sources in the rich off-shore bays. Plus 'albatross' carries a certain cachet for all readers of English literature, though not for the fictional Susan Barton, since Coleridge would not write his albatross-burdened "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" for another century. 
          The point is that Coatzee's language -- his fictional voice -- here and throughout this book embodies the pleasures of the English speech of that time and place: a joy in embellishment, in assertion, in the pleasure of argument for its own sake. 
           Similar claims may be made for the voice of Dickens and many of his characters a century later, though his speaker are so full of the joy of elaboration, so enamored of the sound of their own voice, that a good deal of Dickens's humor comes from making fun of their pomposity. 
           And Shakespeare's speakers both embody a degree of elaboration unmatched anywhere (in my experience at least), while other characters offer snidely under-cutting rhetorical thrusts. 
Polonius: "Your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?"
Getrude interrupts, concisely: "More matter with less art."          Literary fiction has room for lots of voices; Hamlet's poetic complaints. His mother's pointed questions. Other sorts of fiction, genres, give us the same voice, again, again, again. We recognize it. Often we choose a book because that's exactly what we wish to hear. 
           But the pleasure of English speech spoken well is not what we experience often when we turn on the radio, click on the TV, pick up the phone, or log onto a web site. On these media it's rare to encounter truly crafted language.
          Satisfying the craving for well crafted speech -- a voice with something to say, and saying it well -- is what an authorial performance such as Coatzee's does. It gives us something our soul knows it needs. 

4.) What is more important to you, story, or character? Why?

A.) What's important to me is voice. Somebody has to be telling something -- let's say 'story' -- in a compelling way. Somebody has to have something to say, and has to know how to say it. The writer, through whatever artifice -- first-person narrator or third-person omniscient or anywhere in between -- has to speak with authority, invite, seduce, or demand the reader's attention. And hold it by delivering the goods. You probably need both story and deep, complex, credible characters to do that job, but you don't get in the door, at least my door, without a tongue in your head. 

The Garden of Fiction: A Mixed Verdict on "The Meursault Investigation"

          I have mixed feelings about "The Meursault Investigation" by Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud, a book that has received considerable worldwide attention and which I have been eager to read in the year since its publication.

          Here is Amazon's capsule summary of the novel's premise:

"He was the brother of 'the Arab' killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus' classic novel ['L'etranger']. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: He gives his brother a story and a name―Musa―and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach."

             Like almost everyone, I was intrigued by that premise. I remember reading "L'etranger" (translated then as "The Stranger," and more recently, and contentiously, as "The Outsider") for a French class and wondering why the victim of the Meursault's maddeningly pointless crime was referred to merely as "l'arabe." Thus, a living breathing human being was cheated of a name. Reading "The Stranger," I simply could not understand how Meursault, the contemporary antihero, could care so absurdly little for the life of the man he killed -- or, ultimately, for his own. Well, that turns out to be the point.

            Daoud's book invents a first-person narrator, who tells the story of Meursault's crime from the point of view of the victim's brother. In that way the novel rights one of Meursault's wrongs: he gives the victim a name and therefore a personal identity and family.  But for much of the novel's first ninety pages or so, I had difficulty believing this correction of the record was worth a whole book. Daoud's narrator, who does nothing but drink in a cafe and obsess over his "pathetic" life (to use his own term), repeats accusation that the highly regarded classic "L'etranger" denied the victim a name about a hundred times through the first two-thirds of the book.

            I take this denial of a victim's identity to stand for a wider point. The European, Western colonialism that dominated and oppressed most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East for centuries deprived these societies of their own identity, suppressed their culture, forbade their religions, and exploited their resources, stealing their wealth to fill the coffers of rich and powerful nations. It's hard to say what reckoning should be made for these crimes. Perhaps we have not yet paid it.

            After Daoud's narrator cycles back and forth through the misery the murder of his brother Musa brings to his mother and himself, he announces that he will begin the whole tale over again. He acknowledges to his listener (a nameless 'researcher' with a notebook) that "I should have told you this story in chronological order." Indeed. The remainder of this book -- whether intended to be truth, allegory, or realistic fiction; in fact it works on all these levels -- is a devastating and riveting psychological portrait of the central figures and the society they now inhabit. And its reach goes well beyond an indictment of Meursault, his crime, his 'outsider' status, and the praise heaped on Camus's book, to the insights Daoud has to offer into the psychology of loss and the 'absurdity' of life as experienced by a particular man in his own harrowing time and place, leaving us with a blistering critique of the deadening independent Algeria that has replaced the exploitive French colony.
            "The Meursault Investigaton" may in fact be the literary tour de force critics have pronounced it, although I found much of this book not much fun to read. The good parts, however, are likely to stay with me (and any reader) for a very long time.

The Garden of Fiction: A Long Slog with the Florida Conquistadors in 'The Moor's Account'

 
Like the subject it portrays, this book went on too long. "The Moor's Account" delivers an "alternative" account of a 1527 Spanish exploration of the Gulf Coast of Florida. Since few of us know anything about the "official" account of this (or any other) Spanish expedition to North America, I'm not sure that there's a crying need for an alternative. Nevertheless, my opinion is definitely a minority report on a novel widely and extravagantly praised by reviewers. The novel (as Amazon tells us) was a  A New York Times Notable Book, A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of the Year, An NPR Great Read of 2014, A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
             Nevertheless I have a sneaking submission that the critics are rewarding author Laila Lalami for her good intentions rather than the actual experience of reading this book. Here is Goodreads' capsule summary: "In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master. .." And, when they get there, to make a very long story short, nothing goes as planned. The expedition's leader captures some Indians and tortures them. The captives tell him what they realize he wants to hear (that's what torture gives you): there's gold in them there swamps, and the expedition blunders on, meeting various disasters, suffering from malaria, until only a few surviving members (including, notably, the Moroccan slave now called Estebanico, who naturally is the only one among them with sense). 
         Here's the moral of the story (via Goodreads): "As the dramatic chronicle unfolds, we come to understand that, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration and Native American men and women were not merely silent witnesses to it. In Laila Lalami’s deft hands, Estebanico’s memoir illuminates the ways in which stories can transmigrate into history, even as storytelling can offer a chance for redemption and survival."
           In short, it's revisionist history. Why do some people (the people who write such reviews) find revisionist history so satisfying? Is it guilty compensation for writing "black men" out of the story of early American history?  
          Our hero is a Moor, from Morocco. Americans such as myself know little of the history of Morocco. That's what I'd like to read about. 

Anyway here's my dissenting review of "The Moor's Account":
          I think the best parts of "The Moor's Account" by
Laila Lalami have to do with the central figure's life in Morocco, at a time when the country increasingly falls under the thumb of the Portuguese and Spanish. Falling into debt because of the Colonial takeover of his city, our hero sells himself into slavery to provide money for his family and is sold again to a Spanish nobleman who takes takes him on an expedition to pillage Florida. 
           I was hoping that an imaginative re-creation of a journey of exploration that receives little attention from our Anglo-centric history of the New World would prove fascinating. But the tale our author spins is perhaps too much like the real thing: long, confusing, filled with tedious physical suffering, and offering little light on what the indigenous people were like. There's even less to like, or to choose from, among the drearily egocentric Spanish characters. As I understand matters, the fictional premise is that this work is the enslaved Moor's first-person account of this 16th century expedition -- an account excluded from Spain's official record. Acting on her premise, the author appears determined to dramatize in detail every encounter in her hero's survivalist odyssey. But we can't tell these indigenous tribes apart. They blur together and end up being what the Indians have always been to their conquerors: the natives. 
            The book's hero loved Morocco, and his family there. He thinks about his mother and brothers all the time, to wonder how they are faring. As a reader, I wanted to know how they were doing as well.
            But nobody, in the Anglo-speaking world at least, has ever loved these Spanish exploiters of the New World. The subject of this novel needs more wonder, poetry, and meaning than "The Moor's Account" delivers.