‘The Republic of Dreams’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Madeline G. Levine

Selecting a story by Schulz is like drawing a thread from a tapestry and holding one’s breath. Born in 1892 in Drohobych, a town in Austrian Galicia currently located in Ukraine, Bruno Schulz wrote in Polish, and conversed in German. As a Jewish male in a land where language and political borders didn’t coincide, Schultz interposes the fantastic and the nostalgic in order to immortalize a world that never existed. Perhaps it is a world which could only exist in the mind of a child.

‘The Republic of Dreams’ tracks a son’s drive with his father from Warsaw to their smaller village of origin. Alternately narrated by the son, and then by the plural pronoun, the “We” of father-son, the story invents its placement, or creates this surreal origin for the speaker. “Here on the streets of Warsaw, in these tumultuous days, fiery and intoxicating, I am transported in thought to the distant city of my dreams…” Schulz begins, before launching into an aerial view of the surrounding landscape, narrowing in on a thing that “lies—like a cat in sunshine—this chosen region, this singular province, this city unique in all the world. It is futile to speak of this to the uninitiated!” This city belongs to them, to the father and the son. In “our city,” says the speaker, “nothing happens in vain.” Unlike the urban cities who expand logically “into economics” and develop “into statistical figures,” their city retains its mysteries, its unreasons, its surreality.

Schulz tantalizes the reader this cyclical world of the Polish small-town where everything speaks: each sunset discloses its warnings, each table predicts the conversations to come, each curtain records the words of humans. “Here, every minute something is resolved in exemplary fashion and for all time. Here, all matters happen only once and irrevocably. That is why there is such gravity, a deep accent of sorrow in what takes place here.” The father, a fabric merchant with a wild imagination and a penchant for esoterics, eventually loses his mind. Schulz portrays him with an extraordinary tenderness, a soft spot for his implacability, which feels as elusive and foolish as hope. The metaphysical wilderness is the “fatherland” Schulz offers the reader—an inescapable, frenzied mysterium of life in a city that is “under the sign of the weed, of wild, passionate, fantastical vegetation shooting out cheap, shoddy greenery, poisonous, virulent, and parasitic.”

I started by acknowledging the difficulty of choosing a single story by Schulz. The reason for this involves the entanglement of his narratives, and the role played by Time. For Schulz, time is a character capable of abandoning the body in order to articulate its own steps across a room. Duration is both empty and overfilled: for example, there is a 13th false month which appears to account for unexplainable happenings (a month possibly related to Jewish mysticism or the father’s esoteric interests). Or maybe the 13th month exists in order to account for everything that occurs outside time–everything that recurs and returns. Schultz doesn’t resolve this for us. This refusal to define the symbolic lends a metaphysical texture to his writing, as does the narrative’s relationship to time. Time is watched, supervised, attended, divided, and rigorously narrated. It is “threadbare “but also “regurgitated, “. Each story reveals itself in relation to time (Rivka Galchen details this in the book’s introduction). Each season, for Schultz, is another story. Nothing is separable or without implication. Schulz’s characters (often drawn from his own family life) read the world in signs and parables.

This relationship between naming, associating, and invoking lies at the heart of my favorite writing. And I suspect kids are better at hearing it, since kids have fewer stakes in saying the correct or accurate thing. The child’s mind takes what exists and builds from the unlikely into the marvelous. The gonads of a male eel are a looped, frilly organ located inside the animal. This is easier for a child to imagine because a child doesn’t have a theory about where gonads should be located. All is still possible. Maturity narrows the world of possibility to the material; it banishes the metaphysical.

Schulz died young, murdered by an SS officer on the street. One dreams of his work continuing, of another book being discovered in a cinnamon shop, under a mud puddle, somewhere, anywhere in the 13th month of what exists.

Collected in Bruno Schulz: Collected Stories, Northwestern University Press, 2018.

‘The Connection’ by Daniil Kharms, translated by Matvei Yankelevich

Comrade of bleak ontologies, Russian writer Daniil Kharms played with chance, formulas, Philokalias, commercial language, ideologism—anything to spite the implied reasonability that the Enlightenment brought to letters. Written in 1937, ‘The Connection’ opens in a direct address to the reader: “Philosopher!” What follows is a brief, numerated list of disparate events which Kharms connects against common sense and logic. The plot is nonexistent, apart from the challenge to the philosopher.

In Kharmsland, shadows are divided from their owners to roam the streets and theorize the actual. Every word matters because every significance will be sliced apart from it. Certain translators capture his absurdism better than others. My preferred translations of Kharms pay tribute to his mixed dictions, and to the spirit of his absurdism rather than literalism.

“1. I am writing to you in answer to your letter which you are about to write to me in answer to my letter which I wrote to you.

2. A violinist bought a magnet and was carrying it home. Along the way, hoods jumped him and knocked his cap off his head. The wind picked up the cap and carried it down the street.”

The magic occurs at the level of the syntax, in the margins, in the kinked links that bloom from juxtaposition. No one antagonizes reality through juxtaposition like Kharms. “It’s so nice to know of what has passed, so pleasant to believe in that which has been proven,” Kharms tells us in ‘Hyma.’ And so precious to believe in time, or evidence.

Collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, The Overlook Press, 2009. Available online here. Also available in an illustrated version with John Freedman’s translation here

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard conceptualizes the book index as an autobiography in ‘The Index’. A brief prefatory note from an editor designates the index as all that remains of a autobiography by “Physician and philosopher, man of action and patron of the arts, sometime claimant to the English throne and founder of a new religion, Henry Rhodes Hamilton.” Immediately, the mystery of Hamilton’s person draws us into reading the index creatively, and engaging it narratively. Ultimately, Hamilton is who you make him, depending on how you connect references as disparate as:

“Berenson, Bernard, conversations with HRH, 134; offer of adoption, 145; loan of
Dürer etching, 146; law-suits against HRH, 173-85
Bergman, Ingrid, 197, 234, 267
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 87
Eckhart, Meister, 265
Hiroshima, HRH observes atomic cloud, 258
Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181”

A play on paranoia and conspiracy, this is Ballard at his disruptive best, challenging post-Enlightenment notions of individual selfhood by forcing us to define a person entirely by his quoted relations to others.

Published in The Paris Review, 1991 and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Last Letter to a Niece’ by Gerald Murnane

‘Last Letter to a Niece’ is included as the final “short fiction” in Gerald Murnane’s Stream System, a collection of his short stories. But it is also published in Murnane’s Last Letter to a Reader, a collection of essays addressed to the reader, each one surveying a book he authored. The landscape is the mind of the author. Murnane maintains two archives: the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written for publication.

Adapted “from one of the seven pages about the life and the writing of Kelemen Mikes in the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature,” Murnane’s last letter crawls inside the history of another putative author in order to invent itself. To me, it is a model of the epistolary fiction form. As the uncle writes this letter, it becomes clear he has never even seen his niece—he is speaking to what he imagines of her—he is, for lack of a better term, creating her as he writes: “I am interested in the appearance and deportment of young women in this, the everyday visible world, for the good reason that the female personages in books, like all other such personages together with the places they inhabit, are quite invisible.” The speaker is selfish: the letter addressed to someone else is actually about the writer’s cannibalizing mind which digests each detail.

When the uncle tells the niece, “In your mind at this very moment are characters, costumes, interiors of houses, landscapes and skies, all of them faithful images of their counterparts in descriptive passages in books you have read and remembered,” he is speaking of himself. The writer, speaking of the power of literature in others’ lives, may always be speaking of himself, of his own power. The desire to “make a true reader” of the niece implies that such a niece would exist in order to become a character in the letter where readers watch him invent her.

Murnane’s epistolary feels closer to a dramatic soliloquy, allowing the speaker to say what the writer knows, namely, “I would seek in books what most others sought among living persons.” Brutality can be intimate; erasure can be tender; humiliation can be creative, Murnane implies. Think of me, rather, as a man who can love only the subjects of sentences in texts reporting to be other than factual,” Murnane writes. Think of me as someone who invents myself in order to draw closer to the person I have created to wander across the page.

Published in Stream System: The Collected Short Stories of Gerald Murnane, Giramondo/Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018, and And Other Stories, 2020. Also collected in Last Letter to a Reader, Giramondo, 2021/And Other Stories, 2022.

‘The Moon Monologue’ by Sheila Heti

A sliver of story. A morsel of moon-mania. Sheila Heti begins in the first person: “Nobody ever accused me of being bright, which I am glad for.” Immediately, the question hinges on the swing of the title— is this the moon giving a monologue, or is this one of those monologues to the lunar issued by a moonstruck poet ? Heti speaks to the moon the way she speaks to a cockroach, namely, with intense interest and curiosity. Her stories thread eeriness by connecting the real to impossible. A pleasure to get lost in Heti’s forests.

Published in The Middle Stories, McSweeney’s Books, 2012

‘The Pure Number’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Mark Polizotti

The boundary between fiction and essay in Marguerite Duras is quite slender. ‘The Pure Number’ destroys me in ways I’d rather not explain or describe.

First published as ‘Le Nombre Pur’ in Écrire, Gallimard, 1993. First published in translation in Writing, University of Minnesota Press, 2011

‘Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture’ by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim

Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš used documentary forms to challenge the truth of official papers and sacred texts. I love him for this. ‘Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture’ is classic Kišean obfuscation in that every word suffers from its elusive nature, and conspiracies wait to bloom between events and signs. Subtitled “Song of Songs, 8:6,” the story doesn’t actually include the text of the epigraph. Instead, Kiš alludes to it. Allusion is central to what he called his “metaphysical fiction.”

Structured as an epistolary addressed to the biographer of Yiddish poet Mendel Osipovitch, the speaker tells the lecturer that she is writing in response to a question he posed to the audience at a recent lecture, namely: “What has become of Mendel Osipovitch’s correspondence?”

According to the speaker, the person who holds the key to this mystery was sitting at the public lecture, among those “who, in fact come only to forget, for a moment, their own loneliness, filled, as it is, with thoughts of death, or simply to see another human being.” Alone, the speaker is surrounded by her memories, and her memories “are people, like a huge graveyard.” (Like his speaker, Kiš remains on intimate terms with the dead. Fragments of dialogue can be traced back to things the author said in essays or interviews.)

The letter-writer sanctifies objects by mentioning them— a kid glove, a black velvet ribbon, the bones of old poems—a lush orchestration of details connecting Catallus to “variations on the theme of bedbugs.” One reads Kiš for the devastating cadence of his sentences: “I remember the description of a tree, a simile, in which the crickets beneath a hotel window in the Crimea chirp like wristwatches being wound, the etymology of the name, of a city, the interpretation of a nightmare.”

One senses his kinship with Lev Shestov in the deployment of metaphysical estrangement, as when “the two events merged into a single image.” The poet is prophet in Kiš; the speaker admits this when she says “since poets speak as prophets, the poem about cannibalist stars became prophetic: our lives, sir, commingled cannibalistically.” There is a love affair that the speaker needs to disclose, an epistolary beneath the willows of red Lenin stamps. Unlike the “arch-materialist Diderot” who urged lovers to be buried side-by-side, the speaker won’t rest at the side of her beloved forever. She will not be “carried away by such fantasies.” And yet:

“The past lives on in us; we cannot blot it out. Since dreams are an image of the other world and proof of its existence, we shall meet in dreams: she kneels by the stove, feeding it with damp wood, or calls to me in a horse voice. I wake up and switch on the light. Pain and remorse slowly turn into the melancholy joy of memories.”

After lambasting the literalism of literary critics, the story ends in a provocative irresolution. But the story doesn’t ever really end for Kiš. See, the book includes a section of end-notes, a piece titled ‘Postscript’ in which Kiš is the speaker who describes ‘Red Stamps’ as “pure fiction,” despite its extensive use of quotations. With no separation between references, ‘Postscript’ flows from one tale to the next exegetically, resembling apocryphal appendage, or an interpretive lens. The authors’ words are italicized, and the quotations are the stable, unitalicized text. For example:

“‘When a writer calls his work a romance,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, ‘it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material.’ Needless to say, the statement applies perfectly to the short story as well.”

If Kiš doesn’t provide a citation for this Hawthorne quote. (Perhaps Hawthorne only says this for the postscript?) Quotation turns the official statements into part of the fiction Kiš tells. As for ‘Red Stamps,’ Kiš referencing the “arch-materialist Diderot,” the author informs the reader that this character derives “doubtless from the following letter which i discovered thanks to Madame Elisabeth de Fontenay”:

“People who have loved each other in life, and asked to be buried, side-by-side or not, perhaps, so mad, as is generally supposed. Perhaps their ashes press together, commingle, and unite… What do I know? Perhaps they have not lost all feeling, all memory of their original state; perhaps a remnant of warmth and life continues to smolder in them. Oh, Sophie, if I might still hope to touch you, feel you, unite with you, merge with you, when we are no more, if there were a law of affinity between our elements, if we were destined to form a single being, if in the train of centuries, I were meant to become one with you, if the molecules of your moldering leather had the power to sister and move about, and go in search of your molecules, dispersed in nature! Leave me this wild fancy; it is so dear to me, it would insure me an eternity in you and with you.”

This letter, of course, is uncited. It is also the final paragraph of the p. s., the last statement in Kiš’s unforgettable book.

First published in Enciklopedija mrtvih, 1983. First published in translation in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, FSG/Faber, 1989. New editions from Northwestern University Press, 1997 and Penguin Modern Classics, 2015, in a new translation.

Postscript

The grave of pianist-composer Glenn Gould is inscribed with the opening notes of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Gould elected to spend eternity marked by the music he performed rather than music he composed, or the books he wrote. I mention this because there is something of music to fiction, and something of performance to the ability to pull it off, making all the parts work together. For the fictionist is both the composer and the conductor. They invent the world and select which instruments to include. But they must also ensure each instrument performs its role as part of the orchestra—so there is the fine-tuning of each instrument, and there is the piece, and both align in a way that captivates the audience. Fiction’s instruments (i.e. characters, landscapes, objects, etc.) score the music, but fiction’s techniques (syntax, diction, narrative strategy, etc.) serve as tempo-markings or indications of how the piece should be performed. The writer is its maestro. The music—the story—must be everything that is the case.

Introduction

On a recent visit, my sister was looking for something to read and asked me to recommend some short stories. I was in my element, going through my bookshelves, finding treasures to share with her. The stories I recommended, and which she loved, are included in this personal anthology. So please consider yourself likewise sitting comfortably in my house, with a cup of tea or drink of your choice, while I pass you some favourite stories from my shelves.

‘The Summer People’ by Shirley Jackson

My first Shirley Jackson story was ‘The Lottery’, with the added magic of hearing the author’s own audio recording of it (here). There are so many of her stories I could have included here but I’ve picked ‘The Summer People’.

Mr and Mrs Allison, “city people”, spend every winter looking forward to staying in their summer cottage, and every autumn they’re sorry to leave. This year, with nothing much to get back to New York for, they decide to stay on. The locals, on whom they depend for groceries and fuel, are not encouraging, and repeatedly remind the Allisons that Labor Day is when people leave. They’re going to give it a try though. “Never know till you try.” This story is a brilliant example of Jackson’s writing about small communities and outsiders, and her engineering of creeping dread.

First published in Charm, September 1950. Collected in Dark Tales, Penguin Classics, 2016

‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

Towards the end of 2020, the writer Ronald De Feo sent me this story by Dino Buzzati, “sometimes called the Italian Kafka.” In ‘Seven Floors’, Giovanni Corte arrives at a sanatorium that specialises in the illness from which he is suffering. His case is “extremely slight” so he is given “a cheerful room on the seventh and uppermost floor”, where “only the very mildest cases were treated”. The worse a patient’s condition, the lower the floor on which they are accommodated, with the first floor reserved for “those for whom all hope had been abandoned.” When Corte is moved down to the sixth floor, it is for purely logistical reasons, and so on. It’s a beautifully crafted story, simultaneously uneasy and funny, with a powerful sense of gravity.

Originally published in La Lettura, March 1937. Published in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder and Boyars, 1965

‘House Taken Over’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

I discovered this author via Chris Power’s Guardian series, A brief survey of the short story. In ‘House Taken Over’, Cortázar’s first published story, two siblings live peacefully together in an “old and spacious” house that “kept the memories” of their ancestors. The narrator seeks out new French literature, but “Nothing worthwhile had arrived in Argentina since 1939”; his sister knits shawls that are unlikely to be used, “Stacked amid a great smell of camphor.” The house has a back section into which they rarely go except to clean away the dust. One day, hearing noises, the narrator shuts and locks the connecting door and tells his sister, “They’ve taken over the back part.” The unspecified nature of this invading presence is fantastically eerie. The siblings continue to live in what they now think of as their part of the house, contentedly killing time, until one day they hear noises “on our side of the oak door”.

Originally published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, December 1946. Published in English in End of the Game and Other Stories, Pantheon Books, 1967. Also collected in Bestiary: Selected Stories, Vintage, 2020

‘Don’t Look Now’ by Daphne du Maurier

I saw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now years before reading the short story on which it’s based, so the film was there like an undercoat as I read – I love them both anyway. John and Laura are holidaying in Venice in the wake of their daughter’s death, and John hopes to coax Laura out of “the numb despair that had seized her since the child died”. When they cross paths with twin sisters – “a couple of old girls” – who relay a psychic vision that the child, “poor little dead Christine”, is right there with them, Laura is “so happy I think I’m going to cry”, but John is troubled by the twins and their persistent presence.

The twins were standing there, the blind one still holding on to her sister’s arm, her sightless eyes fixed firmly upon him. He felt himself held, unable to move, and an impending sense of doom, of tragedy, came upon him.

Du Maurier’s story is intensely uncanny and increasingly sinister, with a brutal and haunting ending.

First published in Not After Midnight and Other Stories, Victor Gollancz, 1971. Also collected in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2006

‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman

I was introduced to Aickman’s work in 2014, through a collaboration with the Curious Tales collective. It was the centenary of Aickman’s birth and Faber had reissued his ‘strange stories’ – I read two collections back to back, Cold Hand in Mine and Dark Entries, immersing myself in his world. In ‘The Hospice’, Lucas Maybury is driving home when he gets lost, ending up “somewhere at the back of beyond”. Hungry, injured and low on petrol, he stops at The Hospice for dinner and accommodation. What follows is an unnerving and anxiety-dreamlike experience, and a memorably unsettling final paragraph.

First published in Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories, Victor Gollancz, 1975. Also collected in Cold Hand in Mine, Faber & Faber, 2014