‘Stone Quarry’ by Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is my favorite writer and I reread his work often. He has been called a grounded visionary who writes mystic fictions. His prose is virtuosic, with grammatically precise, beautifully constructed, yet oftentimes complex sentences that may require rereading. Merve Emre has praised the “technicity” of his writing. In discussing his work, Murnane has said, “behind a simple seeming image can lie a dense network of meaning.” He talks about a “country on the far side of fiction”, whose “setting is place after place in the invisible world”. This “invisible world”, which can be equated with our mind, contains a “richly detailed map of an immense landscape.” There are many dichotomies at play in his work: visible vs invisible; actual vs. possible; communication vs silence; presence vs absence.

These all come into play in ‘Stone Quarry’ and any attempt at unearthing the import of this story will be but a feeble effort. I can but only offer some brief glints of light as I have discerned them. It is about a most unusual writing workshop, the amusingly named Waldo school, whose avowed purpose is to communicate the seriousness of writing fiction. Participants are not allowed to talk to each other; communication is done by exchanging fiction they have written during the day. Writing is destroyed at the end of the workshop, suggesting that when we write it is primarily for ourselves. An amusing scene which should resonate with every writer is of a participant still revising his work as he is preparing to throw it in the bonfire. As in many of Murnane’s stories there is also an unapproachable, inaccessible woman.

For me, the essence of the story is about the solitary nature of reading and writing. My favorite quote about writing comes from this story. “A writer’s precious resource is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which one might read all the wisdom of the world.” The narrator senses that he must approach the actual obliquely, looking inward into the solitude of the self to become a “starer into the fog” and a “mutterer of the names of islands on the wrong side of the country”. It might then be the case that words might be found where “the invisible was on the point of becoming visible”.

First published in Meanjin, 1986, and available to read here. Collected in Stream System: Collected Stories of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018

‘Billie Holiday’ by Elizabeth Hardwick

This is the first piece I ever read by Elizabeth Hardwick. I had seen her touted as one of the great essayists and knew she had a hand in founding NYRB. I was amazed at the expressiveness of the writing and have since read most of her essays. Sentence after sentence was a marvel of prose with evocative descriptions, startling adjectives, and surprising metaphors; it is the kind of prose that has seemingly been lost in most contemporary writing, perhaps due to an unwillingness to invest time in what she has referred to elsewhere as “the cold hardship of writing”. Is this a short story, is it an essay, or is it memoir? A slightly revised version appears as a section in her novel Sleepless Nights, and I think of it as a short story, where certain factual events have been embellished.

The narrator lives in a hotel, which is surrounded by “futile shops” selling “incurious curiosities”. She begins to frequent jazz clubs with her roommate where she encounters the “stately, sinister” Billie Holiday, with her “splendid archaic head dragged up from the Aegean” and her air of “luminous destruction”. “Here was a woman who had never been a Christian”. Her erstwhile trumpeter and lover with his lovely face, “looked like a sacrifice impaled on the stalk of his head”, and his brother, her gofer, was a “hectic Hermes, working in Hades”. Ultimately, the defining characteristic of Billie Holiday was style, her “retrieval from darkness of pure style.” I periodically reread Hardwick’s essay ‘The Art of the Essay’, a paradigm itself of essay writing, to revivify my own writing. In this latter essay, Hardwick ends it by stating that the most important aspect of an essay, which also applies to short stories, is “the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text.” Few writers can match Hardwick’s personal signature.

First published in the New York Review of Books, March 1976, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics, A Selection, edited by Edwin Frank, New York Review Books, 2019

‘Black Venus’ by Angela Carter

Here are phrases from the opening paragraph. “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart……Soft twists of mist invade the alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit.” What immediately attracted me to Angela Carter was the language, the lush vitality of her painterly prose, Proustian in its polyphony with surprising metaphors and vivid imagery. ‘Black Venus’ is about Jeanne Duval, the courtesan mistress of Baudelaire, his mistress-of mistresses, with whom he had a tumultuous on-off relationship. She was his muse for several of the poems in Flowers of Evil, the one central to this story being ‘La Serpent Qui Danse’. In the central scene she dances naked for Baudelaire in his apartment evoking the seamier side of the Belle Époque. Then, later, ‘Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise’, as Carter conjures images of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Interspersed with scenes from Baudelaire’s apartment, Carter reimagines her early years prior to her arrival in Paris and then her final syphilis-ridden days after she suffered a stroke. But, oh, the language! If only I could write like that.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985; collected in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996

‘Oscar’ by Djuna Barnes

When I first read Djuna Barnes’ masterpiece Nightwood, my intrigue and fascination was coupled with bemusement. I did not really understand nor could hope to explain what I had just read. Reading her recently published book of short stories, I Am Alien to Life, allowed me to begin to perceive certain recurring themes. Foremost among the pleasures of reading Barnes is her idiosyncratic use of language. In his introduction to Nightwood, T.S. Eliot praises her “great achievement of style and the beauty of phrasing”, while Merve Emre in her introduction to these stories praises the “strange beauty” of her expressive writing.

In ‘Oscar”, Emma is a twice-married widow raising her teenage son, Oscar. She vacillates between two male suitors, Strausmann, “filled with German lust”, who could “turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel”, and Kahn, who has “an odor about him of the rather recent cult of the terribly good”. The terribly good do not have much currency in Djuna’s world. As she writes elsewhere, to be undefiled is a “terrible virtue”. The themes of “Oscar” exemplify those present in these stories of alienation, as their characters, such as Emma and Kahn, cleave to life in a state of melancholy and dire expectancy, longing for meaning and beauty. Emma bemoans her life as she grapples with feelings of hopeless estrangement from an unintelligible world.. “What are we all doing here? I must know, I must know.” She longs for “soul-making” in the sense of Keats. In fact, the essential question in these stories is how one to make one’s mark in the world. What if one’s life has been false, “a little abyss from which I shall crawl, laughing at the evil of my own limitations”? The unexpected conclusion of the story comes as a startling surprise to the reader.

First published in A Book, Boni and Liveright, 1923; collected in I am Alien to Life, edited and with a foreword by Merve Emre, McNally Editions, 2024

‘The Book of Sand’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

The phrase mystic fictions immediately brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges. On the subject of infinity, Jorge Luis Borges opined, “there is one concept that corrupts and deranges the others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited domain is Ethics; I refer to the Infinite.” He went on to say it would take him seven years of metaphysical, theological, and mathematical study to begin to broach the topic. Borges was conversant with mathematics, certainly being familiar with Cantor’s set theory, as he named ‘The Aleph’ after Cantor’s transfinite numbers. He reviewed a mathematics book, in which he amusingly referred to the “mildly obscene” Möbius strip. (The Möbius strip was the inspiration for a story ‘The Disk’ about a one-sided coin.)

As a mathematician, I have always enjoyed his stories regarding the infinite. Most famous of these are ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Aleph’. Less well-known, but a particular favorite of mine, is ‘The Book of Sand’. Four short pages encapsulate the magic of Borges’ fictions. A mysterious man shows up at the door of the narrator, a collector of rare books, with a book containing an infinite number of pages. Upon reading a page in this Book of Books and then closing it, one will never encounter that page again. The pages are like grains of sand and are metonymic of the moments in our lives, which can never be recaptured except through the vagaries of memory. Our narrator acquires the book and becomes obsessed with it. Soon he realizes, echoing the quote from Borges, that it is monstrous. “I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality.” It always gave me pleasure to show students that if this Book of Sand had countably many infinite, infinitely thin pages, then it can be proven that if you held it vertically and looked at the spine, you would not see it, since it would have what is called measure 0.

First published in Spanish in El libro de arena in 1975; first published in English in a translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in The New Yorker, 1977; now available in Collected Fictions, Penguin Books, 1998

‘Reincarnation’ by Cristina Rivera Garza

E.M. Forster wrote in his commonplace book “only things seen sideways sink deep.” This quote is very apposite to the fiction of Cristina Rivera Garza. She recently won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; however, it is her fiction that is strangely engrossing and compelling, albeit unsettling and mysterious. In the midst of her novel Death Takes Me, Rivera Garza writes: “What is really happening? This the novel cannot know.” I like her experimentation: Death Takes Me is an unusual hybrid of genres. Her introduction to this book of short stories was very illuminating, particularly her notion of the reader as an accomplice or co-conspirator. Using the metaphor of buildings, she says that if a novel can be thought of as a house, a short story is akin to a room or a habitation. The final section of the collection, Diminitus, experiments with the very short form, and as can be gleaned from the Latin, the “habitations” are very small spaces, perhaps the corner of a room.

‘Reincarnation’ comprises approximately seventy isolated sentences; there are no paragraphs. It is about a couple whose two-year-old son has died and their bereavement has led to estrangement, if not anger. Language is never a handmaiden to the narrative in Rivera Garza’s writing. She uses the word affliction to describe the state of the couple. “The affliction could be heard in the ringing of her heels on the marble floor. The affliction is a matter of excess of order.” Sentences about the couple are intercalated with interjections by the narrator making pronouncements not only on the couple’s situation, but also general observations about the human condition, as well as the role of language. “The crime is a place to which you have to return. Language is like that. The same can be said about accidental death.” The nature of the exposition behooves the reader to become an accomplice in creating meaning for the story.

Available in New and Selected Stories, Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2022

‘Out’ by Samanta Schweblin

When I first read about Samanta Schweblin, my impression was that her stories might not necessarily be my cup of tea, so to speak. Literary creepiness at times verging into horror were among some of the descriptions. Nonetheless, I reconsidered. Nobelist J.M. Coetzee has succinctly captured much of her appeal. “Tales of somber humor, full of characters who slide into the cracks or fall through holes into alternate realities.” I began with Seven Empty Houses and was surprised by how compelling I found the lapidary precision of her prose; the writing is austere, but not one word is wasted as the narrative is propelled forward and after a page or two is difficult to put down. Her stories are filled with what Anne Carson has called the metaphysical silence between the words. I have since read all her work and eagerly await her next book.

‘Out’ begins with a woman coming out of the shower, standing in front of her husband wanting to say something, seemingly in atonement for a misdeed, but the words will not come out. It remains a mystery. “I have to say it, I tell myself, because it is part of the punishment I now have coming. I have to say it, I repeat to myself, but it’s an impossible command.’” Things are clearly amiss and she abruptly walks out of the house with wet hair, naked under her bathrobe, and in slippers. In the elevator she meets a man who announces his wife will kill him if he goes home. He is clearly from a different social class, perhaps a janitor or electrician, or so she surmises. As the woman is walking along the street aimlessly, the man from the elevator drives by and she gets in the car. He refers to himself as an escapist, amusingly so, as he fixes fire escapes. Yet, is she not in fact the escapist, escaping from her life and uncomfortable relationship with her husband? The story, as with many of the others, is pregnant with possibilities, dread, and foreboding. What are the man’s intentions? Why is she doing this? What will be the denouement? Part of the appeal of her work is the subversion of expectations.

Published online in English translation on Bookanista, and available to read here; also in Seven Empty Houses, Riverhead Press, 2002

‘Before the Law’ and ‘The Imperial Message’ by Franz Kafka

Albert Einstein has said, “Kafka is too much for the human mind to grasp”. There are many fascinating short stories that lend themselves to a myriad of interpretations, stories such as ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘The Country Doctor’, and ‘The Burrow’. However, many of his main themes and concerns appear in condensed albeit recondite form in his short parables, in particular in ‘Before the Law’ and ‘The Imperial Message’. To quote the definition, a parable is a short allegorical story designed to teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. What exactly are the truths and moral lessons that Kafka is imparting in these two brief works? ‘Before the Law’ is a scant two pages and ‘The Imperial Message’ is barely one.

In ‘Before the Law’, a man from the country arrives before the Law and prays for admittance from a gatekeeper, who replies that admittance is possible, but not at this time. The man thinks that “the Law should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone.” Years go by and the man sits there waiting for admittance. As he nears death, he asks a final question. How is it that he is the only one seeking admittance to the Law? The reply is, “no one else could ever be admitted since this gate is only for you. I am going to shut it now.” This very brief story suggests a myriad of questions, the first being what exactly is the Law? Are we speaking in terms of religion? Is it God? Or, does it represent our society? Our parents? The government? What else might it represent? Other questions then immediately insinuate themselves. Are we always before some version of the Law? What does the doorkeeper/gateway represent?

What does it mean to be “outside” as opposed to “inside”? Is it not only about admittance, but also acceptance, as well as the idea of permission? Do we always strive for something that is beyond us, forever inaccessible, like the Castle is for K, in Kafka’s last unfinished book? We do live in a world of prohibitions and restrictions, where the concept of permission is central. We never understand why admittance is so important to the man. For whatever reason, and most likely he does not understand it himself, he seems to have wasted his life hoping to pass through the gate. The French literary critic Hélène offers some interesting perspectives. She suggests “the law cannot be defined.” “The law is in the man, so how can he enter the law?” The law represents a divided desire in the man, since he desperately wants but needs permission.

In ‘The Imperial Message”, a dying Emperor entrusts a message to a messenger intended for a man who awaits, “the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun.” The parable is addressed to this man. However, due to insurmountable obstacles, the messenger is unable to reach him. The story ends with the enigmatic rejoinder to the waiting man. “But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”

In what sense are the parables similar? Perhaps knowledge and salvation are possible, and we can try to approach them, as long as we understand we will never reach them. It may be the case that the Emperor’s wisdom lies within him in the same sense that the law is within the man. This brings to mind a quote from Gerald Murnane. “Everything is possible except, of course, the actual.”

(It should be noted that there is a longer version of ‘Before the Law’ with much more detailed philosophical discussion between the man and the gatekeeper, but I prefer this gnomic version.)

in The Complete Short Stories and Parables, Quality paperback Book Club, New York, 1983

‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’ by Lydia Davis

In his diaries Franz Kafka listed among his failings his timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness. “There is a goal, but no way. What we call a way is hesitation.” These notions are uncannily captured by Lydia Davis, in addition to her being able to duplicate the voice of Kafka’s prose. Her idiosyncratic short fictions, some only one sentence long, earned her the International Booker Prize. (Davis is equally noted as a translator of Proust, Flaubert, and Blanchot, and her essays on translating and on learning to translate Dutch and Norwegian are among my favorites.) In her recent book, Davis admitted to Kafka’s diaries providing an inspiration for her own work.

The premise of ‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’ is that he is preparing to cook for Milena Jesenská, with whom he had a passionate epistolary affair, which broke off after she refused to leave her husband. It would help the reader to have some knowledge of this (see Letters to Milena) and Kafka’s tortured and tortuous relationships with women, especially Felice Bauer to whom he was engaged twice, yet unable to follow through. Rereading the story made me smile continuously at Davis’s wit and ability to write so believably in Kafka’s voice.

Preparing the menu is as if “I were being forced to hammer a nail into stone, as if I were both the one hammering and also the nail.” Kafka stresses out over the benefits and downsides to potato salad or beet salad, and whether or not to add beef. “Why am I a human being? I ask myself – what an extremely vague condition.” Yes, indeed! As the evening progresses “I lamented my waning strength. I lamented being born, I lamented the light of the sun.” The story is a sheer delight from beginning to end. The reader is left in suspenseful anxiety, much as Kafka is, in anticipation of what can only be a desultory outcome to this fraught culinary adventure.

In The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis, Picador, 2009

‘The Domain of Arnheim’ by Edgar Allan Poe

I first encountered the phrase The Domain of Arnheim upon viewing with the usual admixture of wonderment and perplexity the painting of that name by René Magritte. The ice-capped, frigid mountains in the distance conjured the domain of some mythic Nordic hero, with the menacing eagle his heraldic symbol. With great surprise I discovered it was inspired by a short story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. This surprise was compounded when I read the story, quite unlike any story by Poe that I had read. Devoid of any Gothic elements or sudden intrusions of horror, it is Poe’s paean to the power of art and the poetic imagination. A nouveau-riche millionaire, Ellison, wishes to create the perfect landscape with novel forms of beauty exemplifying “supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment. …no such combination of scenery exists as the painter of genius may produce”. Besides beauty and magnificence, one of the qualities of Ellison’s landscape should be strangeness. As the story unfolds, the intoxicating landscape, with its lush verdure and opulent colors, is entered on a body of water, through a magnificent gate. Some readers have commented on what they perceive to be the funereal aspect of this story, the boat traveling along a romanticized version of the River Styx.

What is striking in this story, and in Poe’s other work, is the beauty and expressiveness of his baroque prose. If you think you know Poe’s fiction well, I suggest you read this story for a different perspective.

in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, The Library of America, 1984

‘The very picture of loneliness’ by Gilbert Sorrentino

I believe that Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most underrated and unappreciated American writers; it would not surprise me if most of the people reading this had not heard of him. He boldly experiments with form, and few writers are funnier or have a better grasp of the quiddities of human nature and the nuances the English language. The first book of his stories I read was Little Casino, which captures the contrariety and confounding absurdity of life (in Brooklyn). Hopeful dreams disperse and dissolve in a vale of tears and laughter. It is filled with temptresses and poseurs, the meritorious and the meretricious, the profligate and the downtrodden. The individual stories are but a few pages long; each one is followed by cynical, sardonic commentary by the narrator. For example, after recounting the bathetic, hapless romantic adventures and history of a married man, he notes “one might, as an amusement, do worse than think of adventures such as these enveloping forward-looking politicians, dim professors of civil engineering, and dreadful Christian fundamentalists.”

The story ‘The very picture of loneliness’ has stayed with me ever since I read it many years ago. In a mere page and a half Sorrentino evokes more empathy and understanding about loneliness, the pathos of never fitting in, and the sad, desperate love of a father for his son than most could summon forth in a novel. It is beautiful in the sense that melancholy can be beautiful. As a father looks, heartbrokenly, at his son standing in a desolate lot in tattered hand-me downs, he realizes that “the boy, in the sad, quiet of this gray, dispirited lot, will be alone always in his life”, destined to never comes to grips with “the distant, perplexing world.” Years later, after father and son have become estranged, he remembers “the shape of a brown leaf that lies at his feet, crepitant.”

in Little Casino, Coffee House Press, 2002