Jun 072015
 

Tom Faure2Tom Faure portrait by 2015 student Emanuel Wickenburg

Below, the lecture I delivered to my high school sophomores in our last class of the year at the French-American School of NY. I tie the fundamental problems explored in our Western Civ curriculum – half history of Western philosophy, half classic literature – to the analogous problems facing this next generation. —Tom Faure

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YOU’VE COME A LONG way this year. You’ve encountered bronze-kneed Greeks (Iliad), old and midnight hags (Macbeth), and white bitches from Bronxville (“Virgins”). You’ve met impetuous gods, impetuous angels, impetuous humans. Tragic humans—many tragic humans. Remember Camus’ words: humans are tragic because they are conscious. We’ve journeyed the stormy waters of the history of Western Civilization, noting with irony that history is written by the victors. History is written by the victors—and all too often these victors have been white men. White men who embody primitive instincts like strength and courage. Cruel men. White men too, though, who possess a relative wisdom.

I use this term “relative wisdom” to assure you of a very important fact of human nature: our virtues and our vices are limited, relative. They are relative to our technology, our social conventions, the knowledge and morals of our time. Our paradigms. More on this later.

So yes, the victors have been white men—not white bitches from Bronxville. But, though we have used the dead white men as the spine of our yearlong conversation about human nature and human nurturing, I hope you have seen how frequently the discussion has turned our attention to the non-dead, the non-white, the non-men. What I’m getting at is that notion we have treated both seriously and laughingly this year: privilege. And those who are underprivileged. Privilege—as I have defined it in my own words: access to capital (economic, political, cultural)—privilege is at the center of today’s paradigm about global capitalism. But you might have a different definition for it. It is not a new notion. As we have analyzed this year, the same concepts keep returning wearing new robes—new names. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are like Frank and Claire Underwood. The Iliad explores the psychological experience of war as do “Redeployment” and “The Point.” The Flood of “Gilgamesh” and the Flood of Oryx and Crake. God of the Bible and Satan of Paradise Lost. Everywhere a search for knowledge, for understanding why we were made. Fallen heroes everywhere. The brashly democratic rogues at FIFA are like Agamemnon and, well, like Vladimir Putin. And like Obama and our American democracy. Oh well. The analogies are everywhere. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. That’s not my line—it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but apparently it wasn’t his line either. History in a nutshell, there. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The myths of the epic hero are echoed by the myths of the religious fanatic, are echoed by the myths of the American Dream, are echoed by the myths of the dorm room hacker-ingénue. The morality, logistics, and existential threat of Artificial Intelligence and high-frequency trading are analogues to the morality, logistics, and existential threat of any of the supernatural forces we’ve read about this year—gods, God, witchcraft, the uncanny, the unknowable tricks of nature and fate.

Privilege, it seems, is one of the various threads we could sew through Oryx and Crake, through Gilgamesh, into the Greek Philosophers, around the Saints and the Dantes, up and under Shakespeare, Milton, and the Renaissance, through the existentialists and the contemporary short story writers. Privilege—knowledge, strength, moral righteousness. Access. Our texts invite basic questions: what do we want our leaders to be like? Do we want our leaders to be like us, or better than us? Like gods? What about our gods? Our idols? Do we want our heroes to be made in our image or to transcend it—to whisper of possibilities, to suggest there is more out there? These are some of the questions you will continually return to as you search the world and search within yourselves for a sense of what exactly the hell is going on. Other questions we have asked this year and you will continue to ask—because history does not repeat, but it rhymes: what is the universe? Who are we? How can humans co-exist? Why do we have morality—is it in our nature, as some studies suggest (but have failed to prove), or does it stem from religion, mythology, and other collective responses to what was deemed necessity? A sad truth about most influential people today is that they accept the Hobbesian view that man is biologically bad and so created society to hold this bad nature in check. But a number of the philosophers and writers you studied this year, including the Cynics, Locke, and Rousseau, argue compellingly that man is naturally good—that society is not inherently a regulatory mechanism designed to keep man from his baser nature, but is rather a harmful set of restrictions designed by those in power in order to maintain control. The politicians and scientists who dominate mainstream intellectual discourse do not recognize this. They are a product of Western capitalism, which has a tendency to try to placate the dissenter with the odd reflection: “if it is so, it must be so for a good reason.” Please do not forget the Rousseauian perspective.

Today I want to turn your focus, as I have often done in our classes together, onto you. What will become of you? “The world is your oyster.” That’s an expression suggesting you have limitless potential. The world is within your reach! The world is your oyster. Unfortunately, the oyster has been sitting in the sun a little too long. (That’s a global warming joke.)

The reason I want to bore into you this concept of relative wisdom is because, as I allude to with the oyster gone bad, your generation faces a terrible time. And we have more ways than ever before to learn about how terrible that time is. This global awareness and interconnectedness can trick us into thinking that if we just think BIG enough, we can solve the big problems. It’s very tempting. But I think that, if you think too big, you might despair. You might fall into the black hole Kurt described in “The Point.” So think about RELATIVE success. Because you happen to have been born at a particular time when there is more information available than ever before about how underprivileged most people are. Our world is incoherent: the 1% own 40% of the wealth. Public schools are becoming ghettos for children of the poor. Indeed, the proliferation of private schools in the 20th century is due in no small part to the efforts by Civil Rights Movement reformers to desegregate public schools. White folks—in other words, the people in power—realized the government was going to try to create equal opportunities, so they expanded the small business of elite private schooling and turned it into the de facto segregating mechanism we have today. I’ll make it simple for you: the globe produces enough food for at least, by conservative measures, 9 billion people. There are 7 billion people on the planet. 2 billion people are going hungry. 2 billion people’s worth of extra food. 2 billion people starving. That’s some incoherent math for you.

And yet millions of poor people in the world actually describe themselves in happier terms than the rich do. Yes. It may be a question of ignorance—i.e.: they don’t know better. What do you think? Are they just ignorant? Perhaps they have relative wisdom. They have a moral life as rich as a wealthy Westerner’s, if not more so, yet they do not suffer the angst of the complacent consumer suffering an embarrassment of riches. The sense is that the unhappiest people are those who are physically suffering (which is a significant number of people) and those who, wading through a muck of decadence, have never learned how to actually fight for happiness.

You face a global capitalist economy and a system of geo-political boundaries whose only impartial (nominally impartial—in reality, I don’t know) oversight comes from a weak, castrated United Nations. Socialism is a dirty word for fascism in some parts, democracy is a dirty word for American imperialism in others. We as a country are wealthier than ever and lonelier than ever. Easy consumption and communication further isolate us. Our solution to isolation is to increase our isolation by interacting with digital versions of ourselves, digital and therefore boxed in by the logics of computation. We begin to define ourselves in response to our performances online—our social network avatars take precedence over the spontaneous, creative, freeing capacities that humans possess and computers don’t. You operate in a digitized social network that feeds valuable information to the technocrats of the future. Google, Facebook, and the NSA are compiling enough data to write the next Matrix. Are we still here, or have we finally plugged in too long? The Matrix might be disguised as the next Bible or the Q’ran. Are we the old man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or are we the butterfly who dreamed of being an old man? I will tell you one thing: I’d rather be a butterfly than a computer algorithm.

Let’s think about our classic texts. On the one hand, technology could have really helped Oedipus out! Imagine if he could have Googled his genetic heritage! Or if he had Twitter! @Oedipus: “Feeling confused. Bad things keep happening around me.” @BlindProphet@Oedipus: “You accidentally killed your Pops. Try not to sleep with your moms now #self-fulfillingprophecy” @Oedipus@BlindProphet: “I see you. (See you. Get it?) Thanks for the heads up. My bad about King Laius.” We might have been robbed of some quality dramatic irony. But more seriously, imagine technology in the hands of Agamemnon. Think of the war shouts he could have delivered if he had data on behavioral trends, your search engine history, your deepest secrets texted to your friend when you thought no one was looking. He would of course exploit that and inspire you and you wouldn’t even know it. Every omen would be a good omen! (Remember his humorous diatribe against Nestor, the seer: “You never give me a good omen!”) Every omen would be good, and it would be evil. You would die for his ego, his empire.

I am frightened by the likelihood that this is close to what goes on now. It’s only paranoia if I’m wrong.

But I’m getting off track. The point is that, yes, it’s fun to think about these things, and joke about the past, and compare Agamemnon to the Most Interesting Man in the World from Dox Equis. By the way, the meme contains its own particularly interesting narrative power and therefore a subtextual dynamic of privilege. But, yes, while you have a series of collective challenges ahead of you (global warming, poverty, inequality, and systematic opacity blocking sound governance) you also have a series of personal challenges you each will face. You are no doubt already aware of some of them. The personal challenges may seem more difficult, though at the same time you may have better luck overcoming your own demons than making the world a better place.

This all comes back to the things we’ve been reading. What is man—this conscious being whose consciousness may be the only thing that makes it unique. Consciousness makes us tragic; it also makes us capable of something computers literally can’t do: think outside the box.

This lecture raises the notion I called “relative wisdom.” I do not want to suggest that everything is relative. Objectivity does exist. This year we have continually explored the difference between absolutes and particulars. 2+2=4. All bachelors are single. Not all bachelors, on the other hand, are happy. It is raining or not raining. Some of our knowledge is true a priori, while some is true conditionally or a posteriori. And SOME of our accepted knowledge is NEITHER true a priori nor a posteriori—it is UNTRUE, we just don’t know it yet ! Yes, some knowledge will be defeated by the progress of knowledge. C’est la vie. The earth is not flat, but it’s also not round—it’s actually an oblong type of flattened sphere, bulging in the middle, like Mr. Faure—kind of like a deflated soccer ball. Somebody call Tom Brady and the NFL. Speaking of corruption.

The point: there is universality. There is objectivity. But you have to accept your own limitations. Relative wisdom. Another concept: the Romantic poet Keats’ negative capability. Recall that this is the ability to accept the fact that some things can’t be immediately known—it is a relinquishing of enormous pressure. It links nicely to Sartre’s call not to give up in the face of radical freedom. A third concept: Nietzsche’s amor fati. Embracing your fate. These all triangulate around a central, primitive emotion: fear of the unknown. I will be the first to tell you I don’t know everything. I don’t even know everything that I DON’T know—that is my personal weakness, my own project. I hope one day to have climbed Plato’s ladder sufficiently to simply understand my own lack of understanding. Yes. You know me fairly well now—you might have noticed my own intellectual confidence. But I actually do possess some humility, I am not all that arrogant—I try to espouse the humility of Socratic self-doubt. I doubt myself. I don’t let others make me doubt myself, I do it myself. And I find that there is so much I don’t know. So step on in. I welcome you to the unknown. It is quite cozy in here.

So let us accept that some things are knowable, and our lives are worth pursuing even if we have stared into the dark abyss of meaninglessness and seen it has a compelling face. Even Nietzsche, to whom we have mistakenly ascribed the label of nihilism, believed life is worth living—in fact, he thought nothing was more essential. What can we do about the problems I’ve mentioned—problems just barely mentioned, and which are just the tip of the iceberg? There are many more problems, universal and personal, you will encounter. I’ve mentioned a few obvious ones. For all this, and in sincere fondness and full acknowledgement that I am just one small, well intentioned but flawed person of thousands whom you encounter in your life journey, I offer you a few parting thoughts, which I won’t go so far as to call lessons:

1) People are generally good.

It’s systems, bureaucracies, institutions, and especially these over the course of time that usually cause the problems. It’s the slow crawl of change. And the essential phenomenological division between individuals and groups—it makes it difficult and frustrating to reconcile individual desires and ideas with the plodding, democratic group’s work. This leads people to frustration and to giving up on the group project. They grab what they can and say “hey, survival of the fittest.” But that doesn’t mean people are bad. Don’t become cynical (small -c) about humans. You can be cynical about humanity, but don’t let that ruin your experience of humans. Humanity =/= Humans.

2) Commune

You need community. The thing about today is you could easily live in a gorgeous expensive luxury New York City apartment and never leave it. You could work from home, shop from home, have sex from home. And this would be your end. Do not hole yourself up inside a world devoid of actual human interaction. I’m not saying this to be anti-social networking. It’s not about that. It’s about the dulling of your senses, your empathy, and your creativity. Empathy, creativity. Because computers are closed circuits. Social networks are not conscious, not tragic, not free. You will be happier if you have people.

3) Relative wisdom.

Maintain an ambition to understand everything and everyone. Accept that you will fail. Accept the unknowableness of being. Accept this even as you study the history of your people and, building on this class, the history of other people. History is written by the victors. But just because history is a construct does not mean we cannot learn from it.

4) There is no perfect painting.

Extending from the previous point: don’t be afraid to fail, period. Not only don’t fear your ignorance. Don’t fear your inevitable failures. Remember what Sartre said. We face—and continually reface—a blank canvas. And we may be tempted to stare at the blank canvas and not add a single brushstroke until we see the endgame, the eventual painting. This is a mistake. You should attack that canvas. We could spend eternity staring at the canvas, unwilling to mark it, searching for the perfect painting. The radical freedom should not render you forlorn. Do not be afraid to mark the canvas. There is no perfect painting.

5) All you need is love.

Not only the Beatles knew this. Some of the most influential engineers and scientists have said the same thing. That the meaning of life is in the ones we love. We have, after all, very little other purpose. Let’s close read that sentence. “All you need is love” sounds like it is defining something via a negative: that ALL you need is love, in other words you need NOTHING except love. But you can read it another way too: “EVERYTHING that you need is love.” Think about that. Everything that you need involves love. Everything you love, you will need. All you love, you need. All you need is love. Woot close reading!

Love is a mystery—we’ve associated it this year with eros, pietas, beatific love, platonic love, familial love…yes, it is probably instinctively as powerful as our fear of the unknown. We biologically need love for the survival of our species. And love has been responsible for the horrors of war and the truth and beauty (another Keats line) of art. Remember Oryx and Crake, the game “Blood and Roses.” Love is a primary motivation for both sides of human history.

I can tell you up front that love is the single greatest thing you will experience, and that on the flip side love will probably cause you great pain. Why? Because human life is short, and the experience of our lives is also myopic, and we make mistakes. We screw up, we hurt people, and, even if we don’t do that, we eventually die. Death is the best case scenario. Grief is the price we pay for love. So yes, love may hurt you. And if it does, then you will be one of the lucky ones—for that pain, though sucky, would be a testament to the greatest feeling a human being can have.

This year I have tried to guide you on your own journey to more critical thinking and reading. I hope the journey has opened your eyes, transported your mind, etc. Maybe even occasionally touched your heart. It has mine. It’s been a pleasure being the Anchises to your Aeneas, the “wise” (hah!) elder who offers the hero knowledge or a weapon so as to obtain the elixir for the hero’s people. I do not take so much credit—you have sought out much more knowledge than I could give. Please, please, keep doing so. Go forth and plunder. Climb the Platonic ladder. Do not forget that the hero’s journey always involves, either directly or indirectly, the seeking of knowledge. Don’t ever let anyone cause you to question yourself. Question yourself. Be well and be good.

—Tom Faure

tom faure

May 072015
 

A koan- or haiku-like style of description in bursts of short sentences…Lish’s writing is as composed as a soldier: methodical, precise, on mission. —Tom Faure

Preparation for the Next Life
Atticus Lish
Tyrant Books, November 2o14
417 pages, $15.00

Many challenges can assail the lost person in a single given night—when there’s no bed, no radiator nor space heater, no roof nor figurative womb to enfold and heal the daily shredded spirit. The forgotten characters of the night wade through a dark terror punctuated by McDonald’s arches, Chinese calligraphy, imperfect halogen, and harsh sounds like billy clubs dragging down fence railings and cash register ka-chings tearing at the tired mind’s fractious sense of reality.

Such muddled, taurine-riddled minds are front and center in Atticus Lish’s outstanding debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life. Released in November by boutique publisher Tyrant Books, the novel just won the 2015 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Lish’s characters live on the margins, but this is not a pity party. If anything, it’s an introduction to globalization. We do not distinguish between the empty roads of Queens and those of Mosul. Nor their trash-filled alleys, nor their migrant workers, nor their deceptive blue skies. The difference is not even clear to the well-trained eyes of Brad Skinner, a stop-lossed, three-tour Iraq War veteran who sees IED risks even in the tumbleweed saunters of an empty plastic bag. Now in the United States, Skinner and an undocumented fast food busser, Lou Zei, are star-crossed lovers trying to get by in the melting pot of Flushing, Queens.

Skinner and Zou Lei (Thunder, in her Uighur dialect) are from near-opposite worlds, but Romeo and Juliet is not the only analogy to draw—Lish’s protagonists are a Beauty and Beast who discover each other literally in an underground food court, an apt crossroads for an aspiring illegal worker and a traumatized, depressed soldier. Lish’s touch is so deft that he does not come off as cloying or contrived in choosing an overtly fitting setting like a black market for these lovers struggling to survive in the shadows of the crumbling towers of the American dream. On the contrary, the novel, while deeply empathetic, seems uninterested in heartstrings. It is caring, but unpitying and unforgiving.

Looking for work early one day, Lou Zei walks from neighborhood to neighborhood, noting that Roosevelt Avenue’s graffiti changes every few blocks, but what does not is the steady sound of locks pulled down and shutters pulled up—of business, the great Sino-American common ground, cranked manually by the working poor in the liminal limbo between twilight and dawn. The lucky ones still are senseless, hearing nothing: they are asleep. The rest are senseless, too: they are exhausted. The problem for Zou Lei and Skinner, ultimately, is that this melting pot of multicultural poverty does not mix well. Violence spills over, not willing to spare young love.

The most devastating aspect of Preparation for the Next Life is not its rich, understated description of wealthy nations and poor people in the Age of Terror. It’s the love story. It’s the characters in general—convicts, cops, veterans, immigrants, and the many combinations thereof. Everybody’s just trying to get by. Skinner rents a basement room, goes to the gym, and relives the horrors of combat on the internet. He sees mangled corpses in folded pizza slices; he holds his gun to his head and dreams of relief. His landlord’s son returns from a ten-year stint in prison; the house is not big enough for the both of them.

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How to explain Atticus Lish’s prose? It reads first as if he is overly fond of sentence fragments—but he actually does not use fragments in abundance, save for the occasional litany of descriptive images. The seeming effect comes from a koan- or haiku-like style of description in bursts of short sentences, as well as the omission of dialogue indicators. A typical passage intertwines calm eddies of four- to eight-word sentences driven by rich, concrete verbs, with the occasional hypnotic sentence that stretches into Fitzgerald-like lyricism, employing active participles and gerunds to string images and observations together in a style resembling almost the stream of consciousness—though his prose does not suffer from the hectic spasmodic urgency of Beat sentimentality. Lish’s writing is as composed as a soldier: methodical, precise, on mission:

His body jerked. He moaned. […] In his dream, he knew what was happening. When they had first arrived, they hadn’t known, having yet to learn. Their unit had provided security for a colonel on daylong sector-assessment missions called SAMs that lasted into the night, and they had seen very little action. If this is war, I’m disappointed, Nowling said, pulling security in the spectacular heat. […] It was hard to sleep. People said I miss my girl. I wanna get some. They manned a checkpoint and shot up a car. Their doc from Opa-locka poured a bag of clotting factor in an Iraqi’s chest. Mom’s head was gone. White-faced, Sconyers ran and got a beanie baby for their daughter.

[…] In the basements, they found electronic equipment, stiffened rags, a crumbling prayer book. Children stared at them. The corpses were few at first, but then they started finding bodies every day. Some were mummified by fire. A bomb went off and spit a person out of a doorway. That smell is burning hair. A truck drove by them full of men with beards and satisfied expressions. Why are we letting them go? Sconyers asked. I don’t get it—Sconyers who carried a copy of the Report of the 9/11 Commission in his assault pack.

Because this is the army. Because this is their country. Because this isn’t supposed to make sense.

Lish’s writing is allusive without lacking concrete immediacy. The description mixes panoramic observations with implied exposition. Implied—because, he laces new expository detail into his scenes without pause or explanation. This is expertly done and contributes to the unsentimental tone of the novel. Take for example this revelation that Skinner has proposed to Zou Lei:

When she came outside in the purple dusk at quitting time, he was waiting. They ate pizza slices while the streetlights came on, went down past the gas station and walked along the river.

She was so moved she didn’t talk for nearly a mile.

What are you thinking?

You have a great heart, Skinner!

He liked it that she was happy

Just you say you will marry to me, it’s incredible.

Lish has suggested he avoided seeking help from his father Gordon—the renowned author, editor, and Raymond Carver’s blue pencil—but there’s something Lish-like here. Maybe it’s in the blood. The answer to this authorial originality question doesn’t matter. What the link does, rather, is illustrate how this author still early in his career is well on his way to becoming a master of story-telling:

The house was two houses. On the first floor, there were the lace curtains and plastic on the couch, the kitchen had a cuckoo clock on the wall, and there was a velvet picture of Elvis looking handsome above the couch his mother sat on. The saints and elves were in the yard. The rooms upstairs were a mess of clothes and junk where his mother and Erin lived among bottles of perfume and shampoo and tarot cards and curling irons and maxi pads and beer can empties and cigarettes and photo albums. You could open a drawer in a broken dresser and find a stack of Polaroids of people and scenes you did not recognize, then look at yourself in the mirror and wonder who you looked like.

He begs rereading.

I don’t know exactly when it was—maybe page 40, maybe 50—but I started rereading some of Lish’s pages backwards. I would reread each of its sentences in reverse order. This reading contained a strange wisdom. Here’s a glimpse of a typical Lish page in which we see the city, the lovers, and his writing style:

When she went back into his room to get her jeans, she saw what they had done to the bed, the mauled sheet. His camouflage gear and clothes were all over the floor. He slept in his poncholiner. On the bedside table were his pills and his lifter’s magazine and a strip of four condoms with blue wrappers. The room smelled like him and her, their sweat, latex, and tobacco. All about the room were empty beer cans he used as ashtrays. Under the bed, there was a used yellow wet latex condom. Another one was twisted in the poncholiner. Her eyes scanned over his cigarettes, his jeans. His boots were lying where he had kicked them off. A pair of blue faded cotton panties had fallen on them, hers.

He came up behind her and put an arm around her waist and put his face in her neck. She held his hand. His face smelled like tobacco. They rocked back and forth like that.

[…] They went out into the quiet night and started hiking down Franklin Avenue until the small American houses gave way to ghetto buildings and then the huge cathedral of Chinatown, over the hill through the dark trees and down the longblock that extended out to the freeway like a jetty.

Now you have to go all the way back, she said.

That don’t matter. I can’t sleep anyway.

[…] The sheds were built open at the top like changing rooms, and when she pulled the chain, her light disturbed her neighbor, who muttered behind the plywood. She switched the light off and kneeled down on her broken mattress, on her coverlet bought in Chinatown, showing teddy bears in bowties. By feel, she plugged her cell phone into the charger, her link to him, and the screen lit up indigo in her hands for several moments shining through her fingers.

Combined with the other characteristics of his writing style, the unified yet non-linear nature of Lish’s prose reminds the reader of the vast multitudinous nature of the various wars the characters are facing. There is no one voice in control, there is no up or down, no central organizing order or clear causality, no beginning or middle—but there is an end. A devastating end.

—Tom Faure

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Tom Take 4

Tom Faure received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Waxwing Literary JournalZocalo Public Square, and Splash of Red. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York.

Contact: tomfaure@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

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May 032014
 

Capturevia www.paolomerenda.it

Beyond the raw emotion and deft psychology contained in these stories, each of Mozzi’s parables drifts into the tall grass of that other garden—the garden of creation, of story-telling, of finding the right word. —Tom Faure

Capture

This Is the Garden
Giulio Mozzi
Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris
Open Letter Books
Paperback, 121 pages, $13.95
978-1-934824-75-7

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What is a garden? For Adam and Eve, it is the warm kingdom of innocence from which they have fallen. For Candide, it is the final plot he must dedicate his life to cultivating. For Giulio Mozzi, the garden resembles a Borgesian labyrinth—a mysterious, perplexing place in which people constantly write, read, and rewrite the ever-shifting planes of some elusive salvation. Mozzi’s garden is both the sandbox of the imagination and also an idyll his sad, thoughtful characters can never seem to achieve.

Mozzi’s This Is the Garden is easily the most rewarding book I’ve read this year. First published in 1993 (and winner of the Premio Mondello) and translated this year by Elizabeth Harris for Open Letter Books, these short stories each explore a combination of metaphors that plague and sanctify the human experience: the word, the letter, the sheltering garden, and the postlapsarian dream of succor.

The first piece in this brief, eight-story collection gives us a petty thief writing to his most recent victim. He is returning two letters he found in the purse he snatched. While detailing the thought process of a criminal observing potential victims, he digresses into disclosures such as that letter-writing seems more honest than the ephemeral, blunt honesty of direct conversation: “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me, and perhaps that’s making me too verbose; my apologies.” Such an existentially conscious and narcissistic character offers his victim enough gems about the letters that perhaps she’ll even forget her material suffering:

“Anyway, since your friend’s descriptions were completely unreal, I took to them at once. Children view reality this way, too, and I’m not sure if it’s instinct or habit that makes adults tell fairytales and stories to reinforce this idea of the world as somehow magical, or if adults are too lazy to explain the way things really work.”

A perfect opening to a story collection, “Cover Letter” tells us what to expect: very fine sentences, outcast characters, tacit ruminations on everything from first impressions to deontology and consequentialism, all held in check by a steady hand. Control is the order of the day and it is mesmerizing to see how much Mozzi packs into just under 120 pages.

His Kafkaesque characters—old, young, male, female, adroit, spacey—do not know what plagues them, necessarily. The second story, “The Apprentice,” tells of a young man who wishes to be more than just a delivery boy, but rather a true apprentice who might grow in time into “a man, a worker.” He experiences the joys and pitfalls of laboring for an uninterested boss who might hold, not only the keys, but the existential manual, to his future. He suffers the futility and anomie of his work, furiously certain that “he’s certainly much more than nothing, even if he doesn’t know what.” The boy haplessly considers the merits of punishment as biblical path to salvation, recalling the garden in which men first foolishly attempted to be like gods.

Each of these stories does indeed evoke or otherwise explicitly depict a garden, but the collection is not purely religious in nature. It’s thoroughly human, it’s Kafka, it’s experience of love and the puzzles of human connection and communication.

“To Mario, the dreams you can’t remember are the most important kind—they protect your vital secrets.” Mario is whiling the time on a five-hour train ride that reminded me in its style of Venedikt Erofeev’s masterful fugue Moscow to the End of the Line.  “Today, Mario is headed to Rome where, perhaps, a woman is waiting for him. A few days ago, he got a letter from her saying: ‘I miss you’ and ‘I wish you were here.’ But the letter didn’t say: ‘Please come.’”

“What he thought were her dreams turned out to be his instead.” What a line—and Mozzi offers many like this. “Trains” is my favorite for its relentless burrowing—again, a Kafka reference of Mozzi’s—into the seismic trepidations of the romantic experience.

Beyond the raw emotion and deft psychology contained in these stories, each of Mozzi’s parables drifts into the tall grass of that other garden—the garden of creation, of story-telling, of finding the right word.

“You might say that in some letters, maybe all letters, the important thing is only said after the final sentence, in the silence that follows.”

Or: “I ask myself what compels all this to hurl itself headlong into something so precise and defined as a story that has a beginning and an end. I think there must be some kind of grudge against reality in all this.”

But fear not—Mozzi does not stake his claim to meta-narrative navel-gazing. The experience that fascinates him most seems to be more primal, more guttural: a person’s simple search for how to speak to another, for how to begin, for how to end: “There’s something I keep trying to say, that grammar won’t permit, won’t allow.”

“I’ll never forget this pain. I beg you, all of you here, and I think I’ve finally managed to say what I had to, after all this hemming and hawing that was more from fear than anything else, because just bringing up certain things is scary, I beg you, please, try and understand my pain even a little, or at least try to accept it as something that could happen and could be true. The books I’ve read have taught me many things, but above all, they’ve taught me to preserve my life and to tuck my voice away inside my life and keep it safe—my voice, unique and private: my unique treasure and my health. I love you all.”

This is not easily digestible and forgotten. Mozzi’s is a European sentence—meandering, introspective, borderline Proustian at times. It is a sentence that demands its place on the page, that, without meaning to, reminds us of how many sentences don’t merit the space we give them. His words breathe in the vastness of their own possibilities, do not want to waste their breath.

“There have been many times, during intense conversations full of affection and emotion, with people I loved very much or at least wanted to love very much, that my words slowly disappeared, until all I had left in my head was one tiny phrase, or a few phrases, incongruous, but full of meaning, mysterious phrases, impossible to say. And in those moments, you can almost hear your brain creaking, straining to raise too great a weight. To say these words, to transform their mystery into a simple sequence, compressions and decompressions of air, to hear them disperse, scattered, useless, this would have been too much. As I stop writing this letter, I apologize to you that I can’t even sign it. Good luck.”

But to rave about the maestro’s sentences is insufficient—what of plot, drama, explosions? There is plenty of that here, in Mozzi’s dream garden. The conflict is buried deep in and burrows deep into the psyche of these perturbingly mundane characters. Mozzi’s little gem is not called This is the Garden, but rather This Is the Garden. The first thought upon finishing the last story of the collection is: ah, yes—there—I must return.

—Tom Faure

 

Tom Take 4

Tom Faure is an MFA in Fiction student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Journal News, and undergraduate magazines at Columbia University. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York.

Contact: tomfaure@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

 

Sep 112013
 

My father worked in the World Trade Center back in 2001. At thirteen, I only vaguely knew this about him. (What did I care? That clear blue Tuesday morning, it became unforgettable.) Some hours of early grief followed, which involved processing both my dad’s absence and larger, then-unarticulated existential anxieties: me, my family, America, etc.; safety and harmony, etc.

But my father (and everyone in his firm) got out, just like so many others. We were the lucky ones—it took years to understand how that day traumatized me nonetheless.

My point right now though, even as we ask the same questions we did following 9/11 (the more things change…), is that at that time, I possessed a therapeutic ace in the hole. I had a fantastic education, one that had introduced me by 10th grade to Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, and Kant. In the years that followed 9/11, my community and I engaged in healing and assessment of the situation through the usual tried-and-true methods. We raised American flags. (I also endured some light torment as a French-American, witnessing “freedom fries” and other idiocy.)

But I also had Diogenes. I had Epicurus. I had Kant. Respectively, they forced me in the wake of 9/11 consider my outlook on life, my outlook on death, and my outlook on right and wrong. Plato’s cave gave me a strange hope about the power of education and knowledge—that it leads to wisdom and virtue. In my young mind this was all connected—the wealthy United States, my family’s fairly idyllic home, the spread of knowledge and virtue. I did not feel hatred for the terrorists. (Perhaps I felt pity or something likewise patronizing, but I forgive myself, for how patronizing can any thirteen-year-old be?)

Aside from a good hug, nothing makes a stronger impact on a child than the power of a new idea.

Twelve years on I’m older and have expanded my knowledge of philosophy (adding non-DWEM among other things!), so that I view current events with a more nuanced approach than simply pitting Diogenes’ cynicism against a vaguely American optimism (now I call this capitalism). The news has not changed much. I am thankful for having my father and for my education. Both have changed my life.

—Tom Faure

Sep 062013
 

At this summer’s residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I was in workshop with the inimitable DG. Among other things, we talked about image patterns and their role in buttressing the spine of a story. I was having trouble, though, differentiating between images that clearly possess thematic importance (what some call a symbol) and images that contribute to the story’s backdrop. Here’s an example—do frequent mention of stars in Star Wars mean stars should be read as an image pattern? If not, what can we call these images that repeat because they’re ubiquitous in the story’s setting?

I recalled that in French grammar school—and on through middle and high school—I learned about something called a champ lexical, or “lexical (or semantic) field.” My fellow French-Americans and I would read a text and have to highlight, for example, all the words in the text that refer (either literally or figuratively) to the sea. Then we could raise our hands, hope the teacher calls on us, and proudly claim we’d found the text’s lexical field of the sea. (Then the beloved French teacher would scowl, as I remember it.)

This concept seemed relevant to image patterns so I quickly googled it to refresh my memory. The definition from this French exercise site captured it:

“Un champ lexical est l’ensemble des mots qui, dans un texte, se rapportent à une même notion.”

Or: A lexical field is the group of words that, in a text, refer to one same notion.

One online resource shows an example of this grade school exercise in interpretation. The authors separate various lexical fields in Baudelaire’s “Autumn Song” and warn readers not to reduce their study of the poem to one lexical field (death) but rather to explore more specific ones that add up to something larger—they identify “temporal adverbs” in red, “sensations of cold” in purple, “auditory sensations” in blue, and “funereal terms” in green.

 Le champ lexical

In French literature we also use the notion of a lexical field to include words from the same etymological family. So, you see, lexical field is a concept that encapsulates denotation and connotation, synonym and semantic family. Do we anglophones discuss images (or motifs) in quite the same way?

Ultimately, “champ lexical” theory dates back to early linguistics. It was formulated by German linguist Jost Trier and was influenced by the ideas of structuralist Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. What linguists call a lexical field shares a history with the literary concept, but linguists are isolating and studying “lexemes” whereas French k-12 readers are playing with highlighters. (That’s just scratching the surface, though. The authors of the above article go further with the literary concept, suggesting that we distinguish between denotative fields, which the authors call a lexical field, and metaphorical or connotative fields, which they call a lexical network.)

There are less productive ways to play with highlighters, I have to say. It’s fascinating to look at other education systems and see how they form readers.

Turning quickly to the term “symbol,” we see that the French definition of symbol resembles the English one: élément ou énoncé descriptif ou narratif susceptible d’une double interprétation sur le plan réaliste et sur le plan des idées. To paraphrase in translation: a word used to evoke a secondary meaning.

In the beginning of my investigation into this foreign concept, I thought it might be interesting to think of image patterning as the umbrella over two things: 1) the concrete, bodily, setting-relevant lexical fields and 2) the abstract, metaphorical, theme-related symbols. Now, I think image patterning and lexical fields are closer to synonyms than I had realized, since both terms incorporate the denotative and the connotative. If nothing else, it’s good to remember that the stars in Star Wars are not necessarily symbols. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

—Tom Faure

Jul 182013
 

Angel Igov via www.programata,bg

Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and published by Open Letter Books, is an ambitious, lyrical novel that succeeds in part by transplanting its story to a semi-fictitious version of the Balkan region. Igov experiments with setting and with an explosive style reminiscent of the Beats’ lyricism combined with Virginia Woolf’s free indirect discourse. His pages-long paragraphs build beyond bite-sized slices consumer readers favor—the reward is a sentential tension that delivers scene, exposition, and character thought all in one.

The following excerpt, taken from the end of the first chapter, captures the distinctive nature of both Igov’s setting and style. When asked via e-mail about the novel’s discomfiting mock-Balkan setting, he wrote:

“The main purpose in establishing this mock-Balkan background is precisely political irony, directed both ways: at Balkan nations, for making their history so crucial to their identity, and at the “West”, for being so eager to use ready-made stereotypes of the region. The Balkans in my novel resemble very much the ones we know from stereotypes even though the ethnonyms are different and history has gone some alternative way.

The mock-Balkan layer also has the idea to introduce some estrangement or alienation from the main story, in a somewhat Brechtian sense.

But I certainly didn’t try to establish a whole fictional world with its clearly cut geography and history. So I don’t expect readers anywhere to draw for themselves a clearer picture than the one I had in mind. The game of hints and ironies is purposefully vague, and it’s vague enough for Bulgarian readers too. As long as it holds and you are partially (but beneficially) lost, that’s good for you.”

—Tom Faure

See Tom Faure’s review of the novel here.

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Actually, it suddenly popped into Krustev’s mind, aren’t these three in college? It’s the middle of May, shouldn’t they be going to lectures right now? He received a full-on lecture in reply. All three of us are taking time off, Maya explained. At the end of sophomore year, lots of people begin doubting whether their major is really for them, they had, too. The three of them had gotten together at the end of last summer and decided that they would give themselves a year to clear things up, then they would decide whether to keep the same majors or to change, interesting, Krustev said, do the three of you always decide what to do as a group? Pretty often, the girl again gave her nervous laugh. It’s been like that since the beginning of high school, always the three of us together. In the beginning everybody thought it was weird, Spartacus cut in, then little by little they got used to it, at the end of the day there are people with much stranger relationships. Krustev couldn’t disagree with that, he himself handled strange relationships well, significantly more successfully than normal ones, take me, for example, Spartacus continued, I’m in law school. Sirma jokes that that’s why I’m such a chatterbox. Right now, I can’t say that I don’t want to study law anymore. It’s just that I need a year off to think things over and figure out whether I really want to go into law or if I’d rather do something else, and now’s the time, because afterwards it will be too late . . . Sirma wanted to know what Krustev’s major had been. Me? He had studied management. Only it was different then, he shrugged, I never really had the college experience, because of music I started my BA a lot later, after the Euphoria guys and I had ditched our instruments and decided to go into business. And I was in a hurry to graduate, even though I’m sure it would’ve been the same, even without a diploma. While they were teaching me how to run a company, I was already running three. He suddenly thought this sounded too arrogant and added that in those years, that happened a lot, it still does now, too, Maya said.

The road rushed on ahead and took the curves fast, narrow, but nice, repaved recently with the Union’s money, traffic was light, few drivers chose to pass through the heart of the Rhodopes on their way to the sea, and Krustev felt a fleeting, hesitant delight in the freedom to drive freely, without getting furious over the trucks and junkers blocking traffic. Below them, to the left, was the river, high since all the snow had already melted, running its course with a cold and no-nonsense determination; beyond it rippled the newly greened hills. They passed through several villages, long and narrow, built along the river, with two-story houses, their black wooden timbers sternly crossed over whitewashed walls. Since few cars passed, people were walking along the highway here and there, sinewy grandfathers and ancient grandmothers, some even leading goats and from the backseat Sirma for no rhyme or reason announced that she had dreamed of being a goat her whole life, but didn’t manage to expand on her argument, seemingly having dozed off again. Krustev put on some music, Maya and Spartacus, perhaps to make him happy, or perhaps completely spontaneously, sang along quietly and swayed in rhythm such that in their interpretation, the careless rock, designed for Saturday night and chicks in leather jackets, sounded and looked like some mystical Indian mantra. Krustev kept silent, he drove slowly through the villages and looked at the people. They spontaneously reminded him of his grandfather, a strange, scowling person, who always looked angry before you started talking to him, then it turned out that he gladly gave himself over to shooting the breeze and telling stories, mostly amusing tales, one, however, the most recent story, was swollen with darkness and violence, and Krustev thought of it from time to time. His grandfather’s village lay on the border of the Ludogorie region, the only Slavic village around, and his house was on the very edge of the village, near the river, a quiet village, pleasant, albeit a lost cause, the communists had forgotten it in their general industrialization, occupied as they were with the more densely Slavic regions, after the fall of communism the state had left the Slavs in peace once and for all, but back then it was the Dacians’ turn, they had moved into erstwhile Thracian towns, and, of course, in the end they fought, the Thracians called it “The Three Months of Unrest,” while everyone else called it the Civil War of ’73. Before the war, everyone from my grandfather’s village figured that the quarrels between the Thracians and the Dacians weren’t their business, they even joked about how the names of the two peoples rhymed, people for whom they felt equally little love lost, the civil war in the Ludogorie, however, made the hostility their business, too. The battles began, the Dacian militias defended their cities street by street and building by building against the army, who rolled in with tanks, but the tanks didn’t do much good in a war in which you couldn’t see your enemy. Everything really had lasted only three months and Krustev, no matter how young he had been then, could confirm that beyond the region and even in the capital, people were hardly aware of the unrest in practice, his father and mother said the same thing, his grandfather’s village, however, was a whole different story. For three days they heard machine gun fire from the direction of the city, all the radios were turned on in hopes of picking up some news, but they only played cheerful Thracian music around the clock. On the third day, the shooting ceased. A rumor spread that the army had taken the city and that the Dacian fighters had scattered, every man trying to save his own skin however he could. The village mayor warned them not to take any Dacians into their homes, should they arrive. Only five years had passed since the Slavic events in Moesia and everyone was afraid of what might happen if Thracian soldiers came to search the village and found hidden enemy fighters. That evening, my grandfather went out to feed his animals and when he opened the door of the barn, he saw two human eyes. It was a young man, no older than twenty, with dirty, matted hair, a gashed forehead and blood stains on his ragged striped shirt, like the shirts the Dacian militias had worn, he hadn’t even managed to take it off. He was severely wounded and feverish, wheezing, rolling his eyes from the cow to the mule and back again, he didn’t say anything. What could Krustev’s grandfather do? All alone in the very last house, just as his village was all alone between the hammer and the anvil of this war, which was not its own. Perhaps the boy would die before the soldiers came, but perhaps not. He left the barn, grabbed his hoe, went back in and brought it down on the boy’s head with all the geezerly strength left in him. He loaded him on the mule somehow or other and threw him into the river. The neighbors kept quiet. The next day a Thracian regiment really did arrive in the village, searched a few houses, sniffed around suspiciously, doled out slaps to a few young men whose looks they didn’t like, and went on their way. The river carried the corpse away and no one in the village mentioned it, his grandfather, however, for some unclear reason was sure that the neighbors had seen everything, he crossed himself surreptitiously, like under communism, and kept repeating, a terrible sin, a terrible sin, a terrible sin, but what else could I do? He lived a long life. He had told Krustev this story the same year that Elena was born and several months before he died. Much time had already passed, he had taken a second wife, a widow from the village, and he had continued living in the last house by the river. Senility was already getting the best of him and Krustev had even wondered whether he hadn’t made the whole story up, because who, really, who could imagine his grandfather killing someone in cold blood with a hoe? Yes, indeed, he had lived in a different time, he had fought in two wars and had won medals for bravery, so that means he surely had killed people, but not with a hoe and not in his very own barn, although do the place and the method really change anything, Krustev grunted and tried to keep his mind on the road.

Sirma announced her latest awakening with a powerful yawn and a quick commentary on her friends’ mantra-like chanting, and for the next half hour they all talked over one another, including Krustev. The asphalt was much better than on the last road. Maya, for her part, had never come this way. They argued for some time about whether she really hadn’t. Krustev asked them whether they hitchhiked often. Not very often, they had done it more in high school. Surely his daughter had tagged along with them as well, but in any case, his observations about the decline of hitchhiking were confirmed. The three of them generally tried to hitch together, sometimes they tried other combinations, but it never went as well. Spartacus had once hitched with three other guys and only a Gypsy horse cart had deigned to drive them between two villages, after which they split up, otherwise it was never going to work. Sirma, for her part, had hitched alone a couple times. Didn’t you ever run into any trouble? No, only once, when a woman had picked her up. Everyone laughed at that, even Krustev. He was feeling better and better, he was tempted to say more normal, but he was no longer sure whether this was normal or whether, on the contrary, the scowling pre-dawn, semi-twilight he had inhabited for such a long time was. There had been flashes during the winter, too, but then Elena had left and he had collapsed again, only he didn’t turn on the television, but read instead, first he read the books he had been given on various occasions in recent years, then the ones Elena had left in her room, after that he went to an online bookstore and ordered a whole series of contemporary titles in translation, they were delivered by van, an astonished young man unloaded two full cardboard boxes in his hallway and left, shaking his head pensively, Krustev read them, some were good, others not so good, but once he had closed the last one—a novel by a Dutch writer about a malicious, blind cellist—he decided that he wouldn’t read anymore and that he had to get out of the house. Maya said that she thought she had forgotten her bathing suit. As if we haven’t seen you without your bathing suit on, Spartacus replied, then realized that they weren’t alone and fell silent, embarrassed. The three of them seemed to spend so much time together that when they found themselves with other people, they quickly forgot about the others’ presence. With the involuntary habit of the male imagination, Krustev envisioned the girl sitting next to him without her bathing suit for an instant and felt uncomfortable about it, as if he had made her an indecent proposal. She was his daughter’s age. Sirma preferred Samothrace to Thasos. Samo-thrace, only Thracians, Krustev joked, without knowing whether they spoke Slavic, but at least Sirma seemed to get it and repeated in delight: Only Thracians, how cool is that! Thasos and Samothrace, the two islands the new state had managed to save when the Macedonian legacy was divvied up. Like many other Slavs, Krustev, with a nostalgia instilled by foreign books, sometimes dreamed of Macedonian times, when the Slavs were merely one of the dozens of people who had inhabited the empire and were in no case so special that they should be subjected to attempts at assimilation, but still, things were clearly changing. Twenty years ago, Thracian kids wouldn’t have taken a ride from a Slav. Twenty years ago, there weren’t many Slavs with their own cars and even fewer of them would have dared to drive straight through the Rhodopes. Had they been to any other Aegean islands? Last year the three of them had made it to Lemnos, while Maya had gone to Santorini with her father. We also want to go to Lesbos, Sirma announced. You two go right on ahead to Lesbos, Spartacus said, that island doesn’t interest me a bit, they all burst out laughing. Krustev was impressed, however. So now that’s possible, he said. We’re all part of the Union and the borders are open. Do you know how hard it was to get a Phrygian visa back in the day? Especially for me, Sirma suddenly blurted out, seeing as how my grandfather is Lydian. But she had never set foot in Lydia. Spartacus and Maya looked extremely surprised, apparently not so much at her parentage, rather at the fact that there was something about her that they didn’t know. The mood crashed for a whole five minutes, at which point Spartacus started talking about Euphoria’s first album again, asking Krustev whether he had it with him in the car and insisting on putting it on. Later, Krustev replied, because in disbelieving gratitude for this kind-hearted twist of fate, he felt himself wanting to sleep, the curves ahead were giving off warm sleep, and when on the outskirts of the next village he saw a shabby roadside dive, he stopped immediately to drink a coffee.

—Angel Igov

 

Jul 162013
 

Angel Igov

 …the story is not only about fleeing one’s shame and insecurities but also about articulating one’s identity in the face of a larger, confusing society that never ceases to change. The stand-out moments of A Short Tale of Shame lie not in the resolution of the friend-love triangle, but in the characters’ semi-mythical experience of the journey. —Tom Faure

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A Short Tale of Shame 
Angel Igov, translated by Angela Rodel
Open Letter Books, May 2013
145 pages, $13.95

Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, is a fine novel that explores how we attempt to escape grief and humiliation, often literally by fleeing through travel.

In some respects Igov has crafted a classic road story. After the death of his wife, middle-aged former musician Boril Krustev has thrown a few belongings into his shiny red car and taken off, vaguely heading south. Tellingly, he does not bring with him a guitar—has not played in months. The story opens after he picks up hitchhikers Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus. They soon recognize him as the father of their childhood friend Elena. Surprisingly, they invite him to join them for the rest of their journey. Krustev tentatively agrees, without fully knowing why—he questions at times whether to leave the younger, liberal youths to their own adventures. Elena is at the heart of each character’s shame, and her libidinous involvement with the hitchhikers is revealed gradually and with artfully-controlled pace. Her awkward inclusion into and subsequent expulsion from the students’ friend-love triangle, all referenced obliquely through their reminiscences, ultimately produces much of the tension of the novel.

Born in Sofia in 1981, Igov studied at Sofia University and was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working toward a PhD in European Literature and has been nominated for awards not only for his fiction but also for his criticism and translation. He has published two short story collections and won the Southern Spring award for debuts in fiction. A Short Tale of Shame was the co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest.

 Igov’s novel is ambitious and experimental on two fronts: in its setting and in its style.

Some foreign readers will not immediately realize we are in “a country that geographically and culturally resembles Bulgaria, yet its history and ethnography seem to have gone some alternative way.”[1] This semi-fictitious “Thracian-dominated state” resembles what is known today as the historical region of Thrace—South East Bulgaria, North East Greece, and North West Turkey—a swath of land that has been invaded by everyone from the Huns to the Celts to the Romans. The setting informs an intriguing secondary theme: questions or crises of identity permeate the novel.

Today, Bulgaria’s population of 7.5 million includes ethnic Turks, Pomaks, Jews, Roma, Russians, Armenians and more. As the English-language Bulgarian magazine Vagabond puts it, “Its long history of local wars, migrations and – in later times – constant changes of national borders has complicated the picture further, turning what is now called Bulgaria into a place where a significant number of diverse minority groups live. Distinguishing between them is sometimes a strenuous task. Some of them are ethnic, others – religious. . . . The origins of most are obscure and often disputed.”[2]

Recently become a member of the European Union (in 2007), Krustev realizes he can drive around the continent at his ease. He has boldly decided to cut through the slightly sketchy Rhodope Mountains to reach the Aegean Sea. We learn more about the history of the region, fraught with ethnic and territorial feuding. Krustev is of the Slavic minority but he muses that this “was no worse than being an Illyrian or Paeonian, and it was definitely much better than being a Dacian.” The history of Balkan upheaval mirrors his anxiety about his ethnicity and his music career. The hitchhikers, who have taken a semester off from college, also experience confusion about who they are and what their futures have in store.

Igov enhances the semi-mythological setting by invoking the story of Croesus and waxing lyrical about the tragic idea of hubris—which also reinforces the compelling themes of mixed traditions and confused identity.

The road formula has offered a long list of heroes, from Gilgamesh to Hunter Thompson, various forms of escape and salvation, but A Short Tale of Shame does not suffer too greatly from treading across worn paths. It is indeed a short tale but one rich with psychological intensity, a story unraveling through reminiscence and rumination. Along with the intriguing setting, Igov’s spare yet expansive writing is what really stands out:

So Sirma was of Lydian descent. Maya couldn’t have been more surprised . . . The absurd fact that Sirma hadn’t talked about it during all the years they had known one another, not only known one another, but had become a common organism, the three of them with Spartacus. It’s like your right leg blurting out to your left hand something it had never suspected, hmm, maybe that isn’t the best comparison, but given that it was something that wasn’t important in the least, why hadn’t she mentioned it until now? . . . To keep quiet about something that didn’t matter, that wasn’t OK, because it puts you in a privileged position and Maya was taken aback by the whole pointlessness of the miscarried secret.

Those consumer readers who are growing more and more used to computer-optimized, bite-size text blocks may have difficulty with Igov’s style of unremitting paragraphs—frequently lasting five or six pages—that flit from past to present and from character to character.

It’s not that Igov is obscurantist—far from it. Rather, he approaches clarity the same way our minds do: by wandering, emotionally sometimes, open to possibility and non-linearity, much like a road tripper might be. The careless reader misses out on what I find to be the main reward of longer, lyrical paragraphs: an energy that builds and amplifies the further the writer goes, building a tension within very sentences and even clauses that in some cases better mimics the madness of the itinerant mind:

As they came out of the water together, Sirma was still shaking from fury and relief, even though, she told herself, the three of them were not supposed to be here at all, and if everything had gone according to plan they wouldn’t be here, then this whole scene would never have happened, but in that case every moment and every action gave rise to and at the same time ruled out countless possibilities, tiny grains of sand, indistinguishable from one another they all dried off with the same towel which Krustev had prudently brought along, how had the thought that he would go and drown himself ever crossed her mind, given that the man had brought a towel, and they sat down on the ground.

The book’s ten chapters interchange close third-person narrators (for the most part switching between them as seamlessly as Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway), and perhaps it is the nature of the automobile that helps preserve the pace and flow: all four characters, borne out in an aimless jaunt in this car, are equal protagonists escaping from various troubles, each given equal value in the rhetorical structure of the novel.

Even so, Igov’s curious form of free indirect discourse can be jarring—especially when it delivers exposition that risks feeling too condensed:

But perhaps every time was strange—wasn’t it strange that he was now riding with Elena’s father, the Beautiful Elena, she was surely the only person who had seriously threatened the unity of their trinity. Maya had brought her to them. She had introduced her ecstatically as her best friend from grade school. Damn, said Sirma. Elena was pretty, artistic, and a half-Slav. Her father had once been the guitarist in Euphoria, and now he was really rich.

Though omitting explicit references to On The Road or other obvious classic road stories, Igov’s novel does allude by name to The Catcher in the Rye[3]. This is apt; in their transformative journey the characters resemble Holden Caufield rather than Sal Paradise, and the traveling at hand is not for kicks so much as to escape phonies and figure out who they are.

“. . . The established eighth graders were just eighth graders, while the new eighth graders, who really should have been preparatory. . . . Sirma had told her one day some time at the end of the fall. You know what the older kids call us? Fakes. Why fakes, Maya didn’t get it. . . . I’m not trying to fake anybody out, Maya said, and I don’t get it at all, it’s not like we decided what they’d call our classes. . . . Maya didn’t know any of the upperclassmen and had nothing to say to any of them, but she was indignant nonetheless. Why the hell fakes?”

Again, the story is not only about fleeing one’s shame and insecurities but also about articulating one’s identity in the face of a larger, confusing society that never ceases to change. The stand-out moments of A Short Tale of Shame lie not in the resolution of the friend-love triangle, but in the characters’ semi-mythical experience of the journey. The novel ends by leaving the reader with a simple image—one that, unlike the complex ethnic history of the region, is more permanent: the characters gathered on the beach, Krustev deciding to pick up a guitar, the group discussing when to head back home.

 —Tom Faure

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Tom Faure

Tom Faure is an MFA in Fiction student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, and a few undergraduate magazines at Columbia University. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York.


Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. From Bulgarian Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, a co-publisher of the original edition of A Short Tale of Shame.
  2. http://www.vagabond.bg/high-beam/2022-diverse-bulgaria/2022-diverse-bulgaria.html
  3. Granted, one could argue Salinger’s novel is also a “road story.”