“Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered of conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. […] He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUN 13, 2011)

This collection of short stories is intriguing and memorable, firstly for its peculiar themes and obsessions, secondly (contrary to what one might expect) because the earlier pieces seem far “better” than the later.

Let’s qualify “better.” The title story “While the Women Are Sleeping” is by far the longest and most self-indulgent of all the pieces, as well as being a relatively “late” piece. Pages of almost-monologue punctuated only by random, unnecessary actions do not constitute a well-crafted short story, in my view. The observations and tension do keep one reading, but in a sitting-back-with-eyebrows-slightly-raised sort of way. Arguably, the feat of retaining reader attention through the obstacle of such a construct is more impressive than if the story were crafted in a manner more conducive to the short story format. However, the bottom line is that it rambles. It’s introspective and ultimately inconclusive.

The short story is an unforgiving mistress. It has certain criteria, one of which is to swallow the reader instantly into its own specific setting and situation. This is the aim of all stories, of whatever length, but the demands made of a short story within a collection like this are far greater than those made of a novel with 300 pages to wallow in. All the stories in this collection do meet this criterion. Each one is vivid and memorable – sometimes unpleasantly so, as in the title story (it leaves one with a kind of “icky” feeling, which is undoubtedly entirely intentional).

The short story demands something else, though. It has to have thrust. If the tale drifts along in a nightmarish river of introspection, possibilities and hypotheticals, before leaving one stranded on a muddy shore with nothing more than a queasy stomach and uncertainty as to what just happened, it can never aspire to being more than mediocre. It is in this respect that the earlier stories outclass the later. They may be gawkier, but their undisguised obsessions have an energy that loses its way in the more convoluted sentences and oblique references in the later works. Though, having said “later” the latest piece in the collection is from 1998, so they are all relatively early works. There’s a certain breathless audacity needed to be able to write of a main character: “Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past” and still expect your reader to stay with you.

The other intriguing aspect of the collection (from an English reader’s point of view) is the seemingly near-stereotypically Spanish preoccupation with death and mortality. Eight of the ten stories deal directly with death, from a bewildering multitude of viewpoints. Add to this that the majority of the pieces are in the first person and you will get the (correct) impression that overall the collection is a head-on confrontation with issues surrounding mortality.

These issues are of a curiously philosophical nature. Mortality as connected with identity is a recurring theme, and the book is crawling with doppelgangers, mirrors, transfigurations and shadows. The self is lost, stolen, misplaced, and unknown in myriad variations. Generation and ancestry is a theme closely linked here, as ancestors and progenitors occur as echoes of the younger generations, haunting and forever directing them, even if unwittingly.

Yet these echoes, though fateful and often baleful, somehow seem to be taken as part of a natural process. Many of the outcomes in the stories are pretty dismal, but there’s a certain satisfaction of a destined, if not a just, end met: as if the Weird sisters were writing a report on the day’s activities.

This brings me back to the title story. One of the central characters is an entirely self-absorbed 23-year-old female. She has abandoned her parents and is currently seemingly content to be the idolatrous object of worship of an older man. She lies on the beach, staring into a hand-mirror, examining her perfect skin for any tiny blemishes. She says not a single word throughout the story. Such progenitor-less self-absorption is seen as a full-stop in the continuum of the general struggle of existence, and as such, more to be pitied than idolised. Perhaps this is the core paradox between Marías’ writing and his philosophy: a short story must be complete of itself, like the Midgard Serpent. His personal philosophy (as it appears in this collection) indicates that this would be the worst of all possible fates, so how could he reconcile the demands of the form to the thrust of the content? With difficulty, it seems.

I enjoyed this book, and will be carrying its images around with me for a long while, I suspect. I would recommend it to anyone interested in short stories. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	New Directions (November 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Javier Marías Wikipedia page on Javier Marías
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Written Lives

Bibliography:

• Voyage Along the Horizon (1972; 2006 in US)
• The Man of Feeling (1986: 2003)
• All Souls (1889; 1992)
• A Heart So White (1992; 1995)
• Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (1994; 1996)
• When I Was Mortal (1996; 1999)
• Dark Back of Time (1998; 2001)
• Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (2002: 2004)
• Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream (2004; 2006)
• While the Women Are Sleeping (2010)
• The Infactuations(August 2013)

NonFiction

• Written Lives (1992; 2007)

“The dead were often surprised by such memories. They might go weeks and months without thinking of the houses and neighborhoods they had grown up in, their triumphs of shame and glory, the jobs, routines, and hobbies that had slowly eaten away their lives, yet the smallest, most inconsequential episode would leap into their thoughts a hundred times a day, like a fish smacking its tail on the surface of a lake. . . They seemed so much heavier than they should have been, as if they were where the true burden of [life’s] meaning lay.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUN 05, 2011)

Kevin Brockmeier builds his novel, A Brief History of the Dead, on a platitude: the dead live on in the memory of the living. The City is a mysterious metropolis that seems to expand by folding in on itself, much like the convoluted corrugations of the brain, in order to accommodate its ever-increasing population. However, this unearthly metastasis notwithstanding, The City isn’t much different than any urban environment found in the living world. People get up, they go to work, they go grocery shopping, and life is still filled with the minor annoyances endemic to city life like “the blasting sound of garbage trucks in the morning, chewing gum on the pavement, and the smell of rotting fish by the river.” Of course, simple pleasures obtain here too, and on a warm spring day, “the park by the river was busiest of city’s busy places, with its row of white pavilions and its long strip of living grass.”

And so life goes on for the City’s residents, much like it does here on Earth, plagued with the uncertainty that underlies existence, the dead not knowing why they’re there, how long they have, and what, if anything, follows their time in the City. Of course, there are a number of theories, the most widely held being that the City was a some sort of “outer room” for people who still “endured in living memory.” The persistent thumping everyone hears – the “Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum” of a heartbeat – seems to lend credence to the theory that the persistent and ubiquitous pounding is “the pulse of those who are still alive. The living carrying [the dead] inside of them like pearls.” However, as most of the City’s population suddenly disappears, and the City itself seems to shrink on itself, the last remaining residents, eventually settling together in the monument district, soon realize they all have one person in common: Laura Byrd.

From Luka Sims, the editor of the City’s only paper, to Lindell Trimble, a PR executive at Coca-Cola, to Coleman Kinzler, a sidewalk preacher, to Bill Bristow, toll booth attendant turned restauranteur: all, for one reason or another, remembered by Laura Byrd.

Laura Byrd, for her part, is having a rough go of being what appears to be the last person left on Earth. Sent by Coca-Cola to the Antarctic on a research expedition to determine the plausibility of using the melting ice-caps in a new Coke (“Coca-Cola – made from the freshest water on planet”), Laura finds herself alone in the research station when the power kicks out. Robert Joyce and Michael Puckett, her co-researchers, set out for another research station more than three weeks ago after their antenna snapped and the team lost the ability to communicate with Coca-Cola, and Laura has long lost hope of their return. With no power and no means of communication, Laura is left with little choice but to follow in their sledge tracks, hoping that she’ll have better luck reaching the other research station and contacting her employer.

After a harrowing journey across a difficult expanse of snow and ice, she finally reaches the station to learn what residents of the City already know. A virus, developed as a biological weapon, has mutated, spreading around the world, killing nearly everyone. By the time she reaches the station, it is too late: all of the members of the research team are dead, Joyce and Puckett nowhere to be found. Moreover, the communication equipment is only picking up fuzz. Her choice: stay, safe and warm with an abundant supply of fresh food and vegetables, in a station potentially still infected with the bio-agent, or venture back across the ice to a penguin rookery with a stronger antenna.

As Laura tries to survive the harsh conditions of Antarctica, in a survival bid of their own, some of the City’s residents try to devise means to contact her. Others are resigned to their fate, whatever it may be, content to go on with their lives in the City with only partial knowledge of the mechanism of their existence, faced with the near certainty that it won’t last forever.

The premise here – that the dead live on in memory – is so fraught with creative potential that it would have been hard not to be disappointed with this book. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that Brockmeier never followed the implications of his scenario through. Was there meant to be an infinite regress of such Cities, places where the people remembered by the remembered lived? Aptly, Laura’s mental state has a causative effect on the City – her perpetual cold in Antarctica causes the City’s snowy streak; her automatic association of her co-researchers, Joyce and Puckett, repeatedly brings them together through coincidence –and yet, Brockmeier strangely stops there, leaving me wondering about Laura’s other feelings and associations; why they didn’t affect the City similarly? Moreover, if Laura’s memory was the mechanism by which the City’s residents lived, why didn’t they appear in the City as Laura remembered them? Laura’s childhood friend, Minny Rings, lives in the City as a full grown woman, even though Laura hasn’t seen her since they were girls. These issues, coupled with the fact that the culprit behind the pandemic couldn’t have been more clichéd, left me ultimately unsatisfied.

With all that said, however, Kevin Brockmeier is an imaginative writer, and this book contains one of the most creative depictions of a death – and perhaps the only actual description of the phenomenology of death – that I’ve ever read. I just wish that what promised to be a fascinating exploration of life and death, cause and effect, memory and communication, didn’t fall victim to a hesitant and ambiguous metaphysics that raised far too many questions and made suspension of disbelief impossible.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 145 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (January 9, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kevin Brockmeier
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Illumination

Bibliography:

• Things That Fall from the Sky: Stories (2002)
• The Truth About Celia (2003)
• The Brief History of the Dead (2006)
• The View from the Seventh Layer (2008)
• The Illumination (February 2011)

For Kids:

• City of Names (2002)
• Grooves: A Kind of Mystery (2006)

“At long last I’m free of that slumber that tied me to the sheet on the big table. You can’t imagine how much I wearied of that room, how tired I was of the visitors who kept arriving, feigning sadness. Where were they when I was alive and kicking, and in need of support? Why were they now assembled together in a show of tears and prayers? Didn’t you think it too much fuss for such limited ends? Well, let me give you the answer: it was fear. That’s why they came. It wasn’t death that they were scared of, but the dead man I am now. They feared the powers I gained by crossing that last frontier.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (SEP 26, 2009)

Author Mia Couto was born in Mozambique to white Portuguese settlers during a period when Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. In a country destined to change radically in his lifetime, Couto has lived through a military coup in 1974 and survived the Mozambican Civil War which left close to a million dead. In 2003 following the invasion of Iraq, Couto–understanding the first hand results of the devastating effects of civil war on innocents–wrote an open letter to President Bush criticizing American foreign policy. With that information in mind, it should come as no surprise that Couto is a writer whose novels carry global, social significance. Couto is a writer who cares about the world humans tend to trash, and he’s a writer who believes in taking a stand.

Couto’s novel Under the Frangipani (translated and published in English in 2001), while ostensibly a detective novel set in a nursing home, blends Mozambique’s colonial history of slave trading with the death of a former military man guilty of many crimes hidden by the social upheaval of the civil war.

Similarly in A River Called Time–a 2002 novel translated from Portuguese by David Brookshaw and published in North America by Serpent’s Tail in September 2009, Couto’s characters cannot be separated from the country’s turbulent past. The novel begins when main character Mariano is summoned back from his studies in the city to the island village of Luar-do-Chao to attend the funeral of his grandfather, family patriarch, Dito Mariano. There’s an immediate sense of mystery mingled with bad omens in what should be a simple–albeit significant–family event.

A River Called Time is an inventive and often playful blend of family politics, African mythology, and magical realism as Couto explores one family’s history against the larger backdrop of a troubled country split by the taint of past colonialism and divisive civil war. Even the name of the family home reflects the country’s divisions:

“The house is named “Nyumba-Kaya” in order “to satisfy relatives from both the North and the South. ‘Nyumba’ is the word for ‘house’ in the Northern languages. In Southern tongues, the word for house is ‘kaya.’”

Mariano’s large, extended family descend on the grandfather’s simple home. According to tradition, the roof has been removed from the living room as “mourning ordains that the sky must penetrate all the rooms, to cleanse them of cosmic impurities.” With the corpse still in the house, Mariano’s grandfather’s presence is as strong as ever, and then Mariano begins to receive messages from beyond the grave. Dito Mariano, it seems, has not yet completely departed. He has “died badly” and lingers in the space between the living and the dead. In order for Dito Mariano to complete his journey to the world of the dead, something must occur….

Dito Mariano’s three sons are each locked into a different phase of Mozambique history: Mariano’s father was “a guerrilla, a revolutionary, opposed to colonial injustice,” Uncle Abstinencio is frozen into tradition and one day “went into exile in his own home,” while the youngest, Uncle Ultimo, wants to eradicate the house and build a luxury resort hotel–thus effectively erasing the last vestiges of the past. With older generations split along lines of different political beliefs and against the open, fetid sores of a recent civil war, Mariano appears to be the person who can possibly fuse old disagreements, and then he discovers that his grandfather wished him to assume the responsibilities of running family affairs. But family affairs are impossibly entwined with the past, and even the island itself still bears the scars of the recently concluded civil war:

“There were coconut palms, the crows, the slowburning fires coming into view. The cement houses were in ruins, exhausted by years of neglect. It wasn’t just the houses that were falling to pieces: time itself was crumbling away. I could still see the letters on a wall through the grime of time: ‘Our land will be the graveyard of capitalism.’ During the war, I had had visions that I never wanted repeated. As if such memories came from a part of me that had already died.”

Couto explores the African concept of death; there’s no clear dividing line, no before and after, no mutually exclusive concepts of life and death, but just one long continual journey in which death only causes a change in the physical condition. Using the strong oral traditions of African culture, the novel fluidly alternates narratives between the younger Mariano and his grandfather. The two communicate as they never did in life, and Mariano gradually discovers just who his grandfather was.

I tend to be drawn to Serpent’s Tail books for their superior crime titles–they publish some of the best new crime books on the market, so A River Called Time is a different side of Serpent’s Tail for this reader. Couto–considered one of his country’s foremost writers is largely unknown by North American readers due to the unavailability of his books in English. It’s always impressive to see a publisher champion an author, and bravo to Serpent’s Tail for facilitating access to Mia Couto.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Serpent’s Tail (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Mia Couto
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of: A Tuner of Silences Other books set in Africa: A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Voices Made Night : Stories (1986; translated 1990 )
• Every Man is a Race (selected works from author translated 1994)
• Under the Frangipani (1996; 2001 in US)
• The Last Flight of The Flamingo (2000; translated 2005)
• Sleepwalking Land (1992: translated 2006)
• A River Called Time (2002; 2009 in US)
• The Tuner of Silences (2009; February 2013 in US)