Reading the World: Amanda Michalopoulou and Etgar Keret

As I blogged about last week, I am going to be making occasional short reviews of books from the Reading the World consortium of publishers of recently-translated fiction. The first two books I chose were short story collections, I'd Like, by Greek author Amanda Michalopoulou, and The Girl on the Fridge by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. If these two are indicative of the quality of this collection of 25 books, then it bodes well for the other 23, as I enjoyed both of these books for very different reasons.

Michalopoulou's collection of 13 short stories reads more like 13 beginnings and middle portions of an unfinished, untamed draft to a novel. In the eponymous first story, a wife and her husband, a frustrated writer, have a fateful meeting with a distinguished author:

"What do you want me to ask? How exactly he beats her? If he pushes her down and kicks her? Is that what you want? To gossip?"

"I want to feel your surprise. You know why your stories have become so hollow? Your characters hear the strangest things in the world and just go on eating their cake. Or smoking."

"Thanks for the constructive criticism! That's just what I need at six in the morning!"

My finger burns inside its splint.

"Why don't we continue this conversation in the morning?" my husband says.

"It is morning."

"All of a sudden I'm exhausted."

"You're always exhausted, every time anything happens to upset the status quo. Just don't take up smoking, please. We've got enough to deal with already, what with the drinking and the constant fault-finding."

He closes the shutters and night falls again, just for the two of us. His exhaustion is contagious. First my brain goes numb, then my hands, then my knees. How will I ever find the strength to take off my clothes and slip into bed? It seems like the most difficult thing in the world. So I just watch him undress.

First his shirt. Then his shoes. He pulls his socks off together with his pants.

A failed writer in boxer shorts.

A failed painter, fully dressed.

We don't hit each other. And we don't embrace.

There are other ways. (pp. 10-11)

From there, the next story, "A Slight, Controlled Unease," takes up the reins of this story, revealing it to be a story within a story, one that the writer is musing over while another seeks domination. Like matrioshka dolls, each story is nested within each other, creating a vivid, insightful, sometimes ironic or cynical tapestry that sucks the reader into its whirling vortex of character and story. Michalopoulou is a very talented storyteller and her prose cuts through those wasted, idle spaces between words, creating an emotional connection between characters and reader.

Etgar Keret's latest collection, The Girl on the Fridge, reminded me of a harsher, even more cynical and ironic version of David Sedaris. The book description gave some hint of this: "A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in [the]Mossad..." Keret's stories revel in the cruelties that lie behind the humor, or perhaps in the humor that lies behind the blackest urges in our lives. Told mostly in very brief 1-3 page stories, here is one example, from "Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo":

The sub told them to line up in pairs. Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo was the odd man out. "I'll be your partner," the sub said and gave him her hand.

Then they went for a walk in the park, and Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo looked at the boats in the artificial lake, and at a gigantic sculpture of an orange, and then a bird pooped on his hat.

"Shit sticks to shit," Yuval shouted at them from behind, and the other kids laughed.

"Ignore them," the sub said and rinsed his hat off under a faucet. Next came the ice-cream man, and everyone bought ice cream. Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo ate his Popsicle, and when he finished, he pushed the stick between the tiles in the pavement and pretended it was a rocket. The other kids were fooling around on the grass, and only Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo and the sub, who was smoking a cigarette and looking pretty tired, stayed on the pavement.

"Why do all the kids hate me?" Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo asked her.

"How should I know?" The sub shrugged her drooping shoulders. "I'm just a sub." (pp. 99-100)

While this might seem to be of the blackest and perhaps most unfunny of humors, it is an element that underlies the more bizarre tales, such as a mother firing a gun at snot-nosed kids who have begun stoning her soldier son, or that of the least intelligent member of the Israeli secret intelligence force, the Mossad. Often cruel things happen, and yet underneath that is an absurdness that made for some uncomfortable chuckles and laughs. Keret's humor is biting and acerbic, but yet it translates well into English and it makes for some startling considerations long after the last word of a story is read.

Both Michalopoulou and Keret display quite a bit of talent with using the le mot juste to set up their tales and to execute them with élan. Their translators, Karen Emmerich for Michalopoulou and Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston for Keret, have done outstanding work with making these stories feel as though the reader were experiencing the author's tale first-hand and not via the translation medium. Both of these are highly recommended works and right now they might be the two best short story collections I've read so far this year.

Publication Dates:

I'd Like - April 10, 2008 (US), tradeback.

The Girl on the Fridge - April 15, 2008 (US), tradeback.

Publishers:

I'd Like - Dalkey Archive Press

The Girl on the Fridge - Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Anthology Reviews: Paper Cities

Cities have fascinating and often troubled histories. So much so that the older cities begin to secrete layers of historical clashes and cultural shifts, with elements of the old mutating to fit the needs of the present. Prod a bit under a city's surface and you are bound to turn up a few skeletons and other rotting vestiges of the older cultural orders. Perhaps it might be best to say instead that if one digs deep enough, one will find all sorts of mythical alligators lurking underneath the surface layer.

This comment of mine regarding Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow can just as easily be applied to a recent anthology that she edited, Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. A city is not a monolithic entity; it shifts and warps the viewer's perception from one street corner or block to the next. If New York's Brooklyn and Bronx neighborhoods differ so much that each has its own accent, why can't there be wildly different cities of the fantastic? As Sedia herself notes in the Editor's Note:

I selected these stories because they share the insight into the cities as living entities, benign or sinister, that can shape the existence of their inhabitants. And they share the passion for those agglomerations of flesh and inanimate matter, with all their foibles, glories, and hidden truths.

In addition, these stories typically do not represent the facets of the subgenre "urban fantasy;" werevolves and vampires in a modern "real" city do not constitute a major part of what transpires in this anthology of 21 stories. What does happen is that in cities real and imagined, with stories that sometimes stretch for many years or historical periods, people interact with these amorphous entities of brick and mortar, or stone and cement, or perhaps wood and iron and tin, all to create vistas that can be exciting or terrifying.

Forrest Aguirre's "Andretto Walks the King's Way" sets the tone early by describing a rural traveler's travels into the city. With its shifting perspectives and Andretto's perplexity on full display, by the time the story concludes, one begins to get the sense of the mysterious allure that cities can have for those who grow up in the countryside. Hal Duncan's "The Tower of Morning Bones" is set in yet another fold of the Vellum, mixing other mythologies together to create a story that is dense, but ultimately rewarding for those who engage the story.

Other stories that I thought were highlights of this collection were Ben Peek's "The Funeral, Ruined," Michael Jasper's "Painting Haiti," and Catherynne M. Valente's excerpt from her upcoming novel, Palimpsest. In each of these tales, there is a beauty to the prose, one that offsets what is transpiring within the stories, creating a dissonance that enticed me to pay even closer attention to what was occurring. The other stories were only a small step behind these in quality, as I do not recall a story that disappointed me.

Paper Cities is an excellent anthology whose stories ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those curious about "urban fantasy" but who may be uncertain if any of the authors who write in this amorphous field might be worth reading. Like real cities, each city presented has its own facets, its own charms, and its own dangers that the characters come to experience. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: April 1, 2008 (US); tradeback.

Publisher: Senses Five Press

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird

weird (wîrd)

adj. weird·er, weird·est

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of the preternatural or supernatural.

2. Of a strikingly odd or unusual character; strange.

3. Archaic Of or relating to fate or the Fates.

n.

1.

a. Fate; destiny.

b. One's assigned lot or fortune, especially when evil.

2. often Weird Greek & Roman Mythology One of the Fates.

tr. & intr.v. weird·ed, weird·ing, weirds

Slang To experience or cause to experience an odd, unusual, and sometimes uneasy sensation. Often used with out.

---

[Middle English werde, fate, having power to control fate, from Old English wyrd, fate; see wer-² in Indo-European roots.]

Despite the seemingly precise definition cited above, "weird" is something that resists pat explanations or cute labels; it is just there, lurking at the peripheries, making the observers of it quite uncomfortable. In fiction, there have been hints of "weirdness" in the writing, places where it feels almost like a transgression to cross, because of its often alien and grotesque nature. From the beloved ruins of the Romanticists to the dank, dark corridors of an Ann Radcliffe, full of mysterious, odd, and quite possibly malevolent creations, to the rather unsettled end to the rather frightful 20th century, many writers have come to explore those boundaries that contain elements that both fascinate and repel humans. When I heard about Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's latest anthology project, The New Weird, I was reminded of a comment by M. John Harrison in his introduction to the PS Publishing edition of China Miéville's The Tain, "China Miéville & the New Weird" written in October 2002:

Good fiction should make us question our experience of the world; not to say the means by which we scaffold that experience. But it should never do this obviously. The most painfully defamiliarising gesture is the most subtle. Good fiction has an uncanny quality: and that's enough to make it "fantasy" and "mainstream" at the same time. Let's go out there, we might say, meaning, into this mainstream arena, and make readers uncomfortable. Instead of splitting hairs let's do some acts of the countermundane.

In his introduction to The New Weird anthology, Jeff VanderMeer addresses not just the history of this "movement," stretching back to and referencing the near-iconic old pulp magazine Weird Tales, but also the problems inherent in such a purposely vague and yet fitting term. Back then, there were no rigidly-defined terms such as "epic fantasy," "urban fantasy," "horror," or "hard SF." Instead, in pulps such as Weird Tales, writers might mix elements of all of the above into an alchemical brew that would leave their readers feeling in turns fascinated and uncomfortable.
All well and good, one might argue. But what makes this "weird" the New Weird? VanderMeer continues, noting that the often-political, almost-always experimental approach of the New Wave writers of the 1960s and 1970s(M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock being two prominent writers of this time period), with their appropriations of whatever "mainstream" tropes and concerns that they saw fit to use, made it okay again, after the rather rigid divisions between SF and Fantasy that occurred during the post-World War II Golden Age of SF era, to blend and blur the boundaries. In addition, during the 1980s, some horror writers (Clive Barker being cited as a major influence) began to take a more visceral, unsettling approach to Lovecraftian themes, daring to reveal much more of the hideousness of the imagined and "real" monsters than had been done before.

But experimenters rarely are accepted into the fold and by the 1990s, during a time in which the older political models seemed to be dissolving into a toxic mixture of ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism, and rising xenophobism in the so-called "First World" nations, some writers influenced by the predecessors mentioned above began to write their own takes on the older fantasy, SF, horror, and "mainstream" tropes. This, VanderMeer postulates, is the beginning point for what later became known as the New Weird.

The term itself, he notes, is quite controversial, as even those associated with its coining, China Miéville, Steph Swainston, and M. John Harrison, later came to distance themselves from the term. Labels, after all, are tricky and confining entities that seek to bind and to standardize. But if "weirdness," this "uncanniness" that unsettles people, is such a slippery, vague word in the first place, how can labels apply? It is around this question that much of the VanderMeers' anthology revolves.

Many anthologies give little more than a brief introduction by the editor(s) of whatever theme(s) that the anthology seeks to explore. Here in The New Weird, the questions raised in the introduction are underscored by how the VanderMeers have divided their book. In the first section, "Stimuli," the reader is introduced to seminal stories such as M. John Harrison's "The Luck in the Head" (originally published in 1984 as part of Viriconium Nights), Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities" (published first in 1984 in the collection Books of Blood, Volume I), and Thomas Ligotti's "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing" (1997 publication, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land). In each of these stories (and others that I neglect to mention above), there are a few common elements. The settings are very vivid, sometimes set in another "world," sometimes in a very recognizable contemporary Earth. The language of the stories focuses heavily on how the narrator/characters interact with their environs, which often differ from the characters' "norms." It is a classic "Man versus the Environment" clash in part, but there is much more to it than just that. In these stories, the reader can expect to find all sorts of unsettling situations or implications based on plot events, all designed to heighten any unease that the reader might hold. As an introduction to the influences on the latter styles, these stories work very well together.

In the second part, "Evidence," there are reprinted stories by Miéville, Jay Lake, Jeffrey Thomas, Steph Swainston, and Jeffrey Ford, among others. In these tales, the earlier tales' atmospheric settings and unsettled narrative reactions is married to an even closer attention to language and "real-world" concerns. Miéville's "Jack," set in his New Crobuzon universe, explores the machinations of a totalitarian state and the usefulness for that regime of having mythical hero-opponents such as Jack Half-a-Prayer oppose it. Miéville's descriptions of the Remaking process, of how Jack is eventually caught, and what happens to his snitch all serve to focus our attention not just on the wonderfully described situation, but also on how our own political systems are fraught with corruption and how complacent many citizens can be in light of such potential governmental abuses. Although the other stories in this section are not quite overtly political (or Marxist) as is Miéville's, they too have their moments in which the "weirdness" presented often hits a bit too close to home for our comfort.

But as well-written and presented as these stories were, one of the key selling points for this anthology in my mind was the third section, "Symposium." Here the VanderMeers have reproduced the opening salvos of a landmark 2003 discussion that originally appeared on The Third Alternative forums (now archived here) as well as publishing reprinted and original essays on the New Weird theme by Michael Cisco, K.J. Bishop, and a series of non-English language editors from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe on the impact that such a movement as the New Weird has had in their countries, both in the selling of translated fiction as well as on native writers. It is in this section that the questions presented in the introduction reemerge and take center stage. The reader witnesses the debates over the terminologies employed, the questions over the efficacies of even having such a label, and so forth. For me, it was this section that made this anthology much more than the sum of its parts.

In the final section, "Laboratory," there is a writing project in which authors not often associated with the original New Weird movement, are presented with a story beginning written by Paul Di Filippo and are asked to riff off of that intro, using their own understandings of what "New Weird" might mean. This collaborative exercise on the parts of Di Filippo, Cat Rambo, Sarah Monette, Daniel Abraham, Felix Gilman, Hal Duncan, and Conrad Williams is a very striking look at how the techniques employed by the New Weird writers have influenced those whose stories at first glance might not be associated with such a movement. It was an interesting way to end the anthology and one that will take me multiple reads before I will feel comfortable presenting a cogent discussion of its themes and elements.

Perhaps that was one of the points of that exercise - to shake readers such as myself from our comfort zones and make us contemplate things that are often baffling, sometimes repulsive, but almost always imaginative and vivid. In this, the final section fits in well with the previous three and hints at what may lay ahead in the field. Defined precisely or not, the New Weird certainly has had a major impact on writing both inside and outside the narrowly-defined genre limns. This eponymous anthology does an outstanding job in presenting the New Weird in all its unsettling, vague, weird glory. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: February 1, 2008 (US), Tradeback.

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Best of 2007: Anthologies and Story Collections

I made it my goal this year to read more anthologies and short story collections by particular authors. Although I still have a few stories here and there to finish in some of these, I have read enough of the following to justify splitting this into two separate categories, one for anthologies and one for collections by one or two authors. I'll announce my Top 3 picks in each category on Monday in my Best of 2007 writeup.

Anthologies:

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), Best American Fantasy

George Mann (ed.), The Solaris Book of New Fantasy

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing

John Klima (ed.), Logorrhea

Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers (eds.), Infinity Plus: The Anthology

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.), The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Peter Wild (ed.), The Flash


Story Collections:

Margo Lanagan, Red Spikes

Sarah Monette, The Bone Key

Richard Parks, Worshipping Small Gods

Michael Cisco, Secret Hours

Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon's Tale and Other Tales

Tim Pratt, Hart & Boot & Other Stories

I have some very tough decisions ahead. Oh, and in the coming days, do expect some reviews of some of those works above that I have yet to review here.

Four Fictions

Occasionally, I read a handful of books in rapid succession that while I believe they merit a consideration from readers, I just do not know if I can say much more than "Book X is one of those you had to experience it stories that you really ought to read!" The first two of the four I want to discuss today are the third and fourth volumes in the Leviathan series that Jeff VanderMeer (and continued later by Forrest Aguirre) began as a way of collecting stories that had a bit of this and a dash of that, making it in the end neither the fish of "mainstream" nor the fowl of "traditional" fantasy. Those who have read much of the "modern surrealistic fantasy" or "New Weird" styles of storytelling will recognize authors such as K.J. Bishop, Jay Lake, Michael Moorcock, Zoran Živković, and many others whose commonalities are not as much an inner congruence of motifs between their works as much as a shared sense of wonder and exploration that has led to an increasing estrangement from the prior models for fantasy and "mainstream" short fiction.

Leviathan Three is the larger (almost 500 pages) of the two and its stories are not as thematically obvious as the fourth (which deals with cities of various forms). This collection of tales of madness and of the seeking of other experiences has as its cornerstone the various "library" stories of Živković that comprise his WFA-winning novella, "The Library." Although I shall not explore the ways in which these stories interact to form a larger and very imaginative whole, suffice to say that I consider this anthology to be one of the "must read" books of the past generation. The stories are impressive and the contributors' list will serve curious readers as a touch stone for the more surrealistic (or "New Weird") stories being lauded today by many readers.

Leviathan 4, on the other hand, is not quite nearly as sprawling or attention-grabbing as its immediate predecessor. However, there are quite a few stories contained within (Lake's story makes up the germ of his latter 2006 release, Trial of Flowers, if I'm not mistaken) that ought to appeal to fans of authors such as Lake and Bishop, not to mention newer and more obscure authors such as Ben Peek. There is a greater sense of story unity, as an urban setting is the central theme of the collection and most of the stories use this setting in various ways to drive their stories forward. In many cases, the authors here manage to imbue their urban surroundings with a sense of alienness that makes the cities as much of a "living" character as the sentient beings transversing them.

One author from this series that I purposely neglected to mention until now is Michael Cisco. In the past month, I have read two 2007 releases of his, the short story collection Secret Hours and the just-released novel called The Traitor. In each of them, Cisco displays a fascination with using words to create a stunning visual image, depending upon often-fragile 1st person narrators to capture the reader's attention and to force them to confront the odd and sometimes terrifying world in which his stories take place. Secret Hours contains 14 stories that purportedly were written as an homage of sorts to H.P. Lovecraft and in some of them, this influence (especially in the establishment of a spooky atmospheric setting) is quite evident. While I personally enjoyed many of these stories, I don't know if they would be straightforward enough for many readers who might prefer a more gradual amping of the action than Cisco's stutter-step approach here.

Cisco's recent novel, The Traitor, however is not only more "accessible," but it also contains one of the most powerful stories I've read of the 2007 releases. The title references quite a few layers of possible "betrayals," and the main character (again a 1st person narrator whose reliability can be called into question) seems to have as much in common with a sort of "criminal" associate of his as he does with those around him. While not strictly an allegory, the way that Cisco constructs the story lends itself to being viewed in that way as much as being taken in for a story of struggle, of human identity, and a whole host of other issues that I shall not discuss here due to the nature of this posting. However, those who do consider reading this work are in for an experience that I believe will move many much more than what they might expect when confronted with a 150 page paperback.

So here they are: four fictions, two of them related anthologies, two of them recent releases by a single author who appears in one of the prior anthologies. Each contains at least traces of surrealist influence on how setting is warped, each contains stories that deal with the fractured natures of that pesky thing called "identity." Each are well worth the effort involved in reading them.