The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (3)
edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
PART THREE OF MY REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/907-2/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
ONE TIME
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Magical verse. Of the coming of the new Ck’o’yo magic to us, but it starts jinxing an established magic, for rain and crops. (See my considerations towards the end of my piece yesterday above on The Ice Dragon for an oblique synchrony?) This incantatory verse tells of the various deals and recriminations between the icons and creatures of the old magic with inchoations of the new, and also tells of the tiered worlds below us, and the walls around us, north west south and east. A gently prodding sense, for me, of Co’v’id, co versus id, all of us Jungian versus just me inside?
SISTER LIGHT, SISTER DARK
by Jane Yolen
“When she slept at last, her dreams were full of wells, caves, and other dark, wet holes.”
An enjoyable, apparently in-media-res, yarn, backed by a fantasy swords and sorcery mythos of contrary methods to one’s intentions for reaching what those intentions, in any event, wanted to reach (in the Gender Wars?), a yarn of what this story title portends, of, arguably, a female Sapphic Laurel & Hardy, but here one is hidden till she is needed, and please do compare the Robert Shearman story where Laurel is partially airbrushed… and as well as what I have just said above, there is a sense that we always have in lockdown about the one who one day will come out into the light to save the world! And as to the stacked pyramid of our still living bodies in the dungeon where we live, what a brilliant concept, especially in our bubbled-up days today! A pyramid for its own sake, just an exercise in someone’s perception of gratuitous, spiteful, perhaps slapstick torture… And, oh yes, dirk or dark, heirs or hairs, well, I’ll leave you to discuss that wordplay among yourselves, once you’ve read it and hopefully enjoyed it as much as I did.
As an aside, today I made special mention of my detailed reviews of both Big Books (modern and classic fantasy) here in my review of ONE THOUSAND SLEEPING SOULS LIE BEST UNKNOWING AND DISTRESSED: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/23915/#comment-19734
From Chapter 2 of ‘The Hotel’ 1927 by Elizabeth Bowen—
‘Luck’s funny,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s constantly good or bad, but it’s sun-y or moon-y, if you know what I mean, and one’s born with one kind or the other. Mine’s moon-y. I’d better go down.’
THE LUCK IN THE HEAD
by M. John Harrison
“What must I do to stop these dreams.”
Some call it luck, the lamb’s love of dreams, others the co-vividness of dreams today, which perhaps not so lucky, where you’re the sacrificial lamb itself. This work defines such co-vivid dreams, the best references I’ve found and way ahead of its times. “There are dreams he wishes to continue and others he does not.” &c &c And this work is also the apotheosis at its best — or bombardment at its worst — of what I love best in fantasy fiction. A sort of Proustian Midsommar genius-loci called Uroconium. He ties himself up to his bed in a room of confinement, till wandering out into what may be dreams, may be not. Ceremonies, masks, children dancing and jumping —and his cared-for mother from a later ‘Sunken Land’. The Daraus Gorge. Surreal or absurdist? Well, neither, really. It is indefinable – between a painting and a story. An insect headed woman, a log lady, and Wicker Man incantations. A tantalising prose style to tantalise even readers like me. And it has characters that might transcend Mikhail Bulgakov — or even Elizabeth Bowen whose words hide things only those of us who truly know about her work do truly know.
“practising and coughing, practising and coughing, under that dull cracked dome”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/m-john-harrison/
WARLOCK AT THE WHEEL
by Diana Wynne-Jones
“I went in my pants.”
An arguably light-hearted tale of a Warlock in a version of Shepherd’s Bush as an alternate world or as our world depending where you live, whereby Yolen’s engaging slapstick now becomes the Warlock’s mis-spelling and by this means stealing a crazy talkative car (still, all cars talk these days now! – even self-drive themselves!) and a small girl and a large dog inadvertently stolen with it, plus undercurrents of rivalry with a pecking order of Magic. The overall top dog in such a spell-making hierarchy, the one at its wheel, is surely any author who writes about such things. And this story seems to have no gestalt-magical connection (yet) with the rest of this book’s fiction, simply self-driving, as it does, a leaky narrative vehicle caught short by its own “burst of desperate magic.”
Well, I sure jumped to conclusions above about the Wynne-Jones, simply because the next story vehicle is now also jumping route zones and came straight after quicker than I could ever have thought!
MRS. TODD’S SHORT CUT
by Stephen King
She was mad for a short cut. That fantasy leap I have been seeking for a few years now discovered here in this wondrous story from a man called Homer, whereby the lack in olden days of Sat-Navs or GPS trackers made it possible to run a mile even faster than Roger Bannister or cross a distance by car beyond any maps’ sense of direction. This is a tale told to me by his own way of speaking, and I rather envy him his captivating by Mrs Todd, and rather fear it, too! He is 70 something like me today, and not much younger then when he spoke with Mrs Todd who was beautiful and much younger than he was (and he was then still with a wife!) and one day he was ‘squittering grout’ in Mrs Todd’s bathroom and she told him of her shortcuts, and she proved it, she did, one day in a car, and I sense it was like leapfrogging the moon or chasing a Goddess Huntress, and when he found squashed into her front grille like grout a creature bigger than it should be, one that had jumped up at the oncoming car instead of crouching down so that it’d go over it and not squash it. Well, I could go on, but this work has undercurrents of things larger than life that lurk in today’s dreams and with elements of unrequited things we all pine about. Not a game, those shortcuts of hers, but deadly serious. Only Summer people like her want to jump Winter? Never to be confined again. Folding maps easier than folding land mass. I could go on, but probably won’t.
My previous reviews of Stephen King: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/stephen-king-the-dark-tower/
This review in general cross-referenced with lepers, leapers, interlopers here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/08/19/a-crown-of-dusk-and-sorrow-benjamin-tweddell/#comment-19754
From Internet: ‘The “-loper” part of “interloper” is related to Middle Dutch and Old English words meaning “to run” and “to leap.” An “interloper” is essentially one who jumps into the midst of things without an invitation to do so.’
ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE STATION WHERE THE TRAIN NEVER STOPS
by Pat Murphy
“Down in the tunnels and secret ways of the city, the white cat mated with a black tom and gave birth to litters of kittens that pounce and play with paper scraps that dance and flutter but never live.”
But these paper scraps, creating a gestalt of pages and a real story upon them, do indeed live, then re-creating by that very story those individuals as collusive coviduals who we think are bums and bag ladies into people who make light and darkness, and even fabricate the past itself, even constructing special lizard dinosaurs to give provenance to the past, as if such things had already existed. Just as the paper scraps themselves did! Here the story in question is a touching one of a bag lady as a light’s ‘providential‘ provenance, a fireborn on the Starlight Run eventually becoming the North Star for real and her ‘covidential’ romantic attachment — for a while, after meeting him at a party — with a shadowborn called Mac, all surveyed by a laid-back convener called Johnson who was probably neither light nor dark but whatever any particular moment needed him to be!
I listened to the Fair Melusine by Mendelssohn after reading this exquisitely rendered story…
AFTER THE HURRICANE
by Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz (translated by Beth Baugh)
”Night had already almost fallen, the oval was a limitless eye with a half-closed eyelid…”
This 1984 story has a haunting poetic durability as well as prefiguring the aftermath of the world’s later tsunami, with a man’s house now draped with squid and octopi, and its owner later waves like an octopus, and he discovers and sees exploited the mermaid, and holds as hostage her string of pearls. The question remains whether such exploitation was fair to Melusine or not. Ends and means, An equivocal message for our times. But nothing can blot out in my mind the tale’s art-for-art’s-sake beauty of the prose telling of the tail itself, and if humankind wagged it or if it wagged us from behind. Or is evil in the eye of the beholder or in its oval office?
“: the pearls, the pearls, if he found them it could be that . . .” (Sic, ellipsis)
Is it an accident of translation that “pearls” relaps with ‘leaps’ within? Pent up with the secret of sinking or swimming by this lithe tale?
“…there were shadows of seagulls sliding in circles over the sand.”
THE GIRL WHO WENT TO THE RICH NEIGHBORHOOD
by Rachel Pollack
“Two policemen ran forward. Masks like smooth mirrors covered their heads so that the rich people would only see themselves if they happened to glance at a policeman.”
A disarmingly child-like, if not childish, story that is arguably socially didactic and equally arguably not didactic at all, whereby a widow, on the poor side of town, living with six daughters, leaves her leg at the grocer to pawn for food, and one of her daughters called Rose has a rite of passage, by stages, to the rich side with help from the Four Winds, a gifted token, a red feather, and much else, to ask the mayor for help. It is sheer and deadpan narration. Bartering with radishes and celery. Along gold and silver streets. The telling part for me was when I realised that the squad of policemen, near the end, formed a socially distanced bubble within a cylinder of bulletproof glass, their mirrored heads bouncing back the starlight to the sky…
In January 2016, I reviewed the short novel TAINARON by the next author below, here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/tainaron-mail-from-another-city/, indeed including ‘The Bystander’ itself that is part of TAINARON, and again, indeed, around that time I reviewed in detail Leena Krohn’s whole huge fiction canon, well, all her mighty fiction that was included in the legendary Cheeky Frawg book of it, by employing several pages of the gestalt review system!
THE BYSTANDER
by Leena Krohn (translated by Hildi Hawkins)
“Since autumn is already approaching here,…”
…it seems even more powerful a work today! As if lockdown is breaking but with a silence, a menace, a parade to end all such parades, Including a diver within a polished surface, a “prophetic dream”, a weevil island within masses, and to see a prince, “—if he is still alive—“ …and dare I call the phenomenon of procession – that I now see it to be – an incredibly slow-motion gestalt leap!
“…full of backs, side by side, broad and narrow, long and sturdy; but all were united by stillness, the same direction and position.”
WILD BOYS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME
by Karen Joy Fowler
Another great discovery for me. An intertwining of two stories of a community situated near the same sporadically encroaching wood on three sides of it and many a rainwater toad as well as a road, but which story is the other’s future? One story ancient, the other more modern? FROM cave painting, or shadows on Plato’s cave wall TO a carved W in a tree where a bullied boy Wystan hides. FROM a grooming by a another boy, an older one with a cough TO a grooming by a father who liked his drink too much. FROM a W as a double hop of a toad (such hops Wystan makes at the end), the letter W always ending with a slant of an upward trajectory TO a W for Werewolf (“half-wolf”). FROM “Happiness comes from doing what you are most suited to do?” (the loneliness of the long-distance reviewer!) and “I suppose this is what prison would be like” TO “When are we humans? […] …when we are dealing with humans?” All these representing the predicament of our times as prophesied by the balance between this work’s two stories.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/years-best-weird-fiction-volume-two/#comment-5631 and https://etepsed.wordpress.com/48-2/
by Marie Hermanson (translated by Charlie Haldén)
I feel forced to indulge myself in another reference to Boris Johnson (see also my Pat Murphy entry above) but this first publication in English of a 1986 story (quite a discovery, too, of a classic fantasy work) presents an incredible inner portrait of our Prime Minister today, and, via a fearless faith in the truth of fiction, it makes arguably preternatural sense of his behaviour in recent months. Just as one example, he once hid in a refrigerator during the election campaign. Ironic, too, in view of his now famous whack-a-mole catchphrase and the sharp-eyed lynx of Cummings following or leading his every move! Eating darkness as the worms eat soil. (Maybe an oblique portrait of Trump in his Twitter den, too?)
On another level, this story makes sense of many people’s instinctive attitudes to their own recent lockdowns. It also is a fine portrait of today’s political kakistocracies in the world. And on a pure level, a fine fairy tale romance of a Princess and a King. And a blindfold as the new mask.
“the human was not halved but half buried”
WHAT THE TAPSTER SAW
by Ben Okri
“Then, as the eggs tormented him with the grating noises within them, as if a horrible birth were cranking away inside their monstrous shapes, he learned patience.”
…until he (a high-climbing tapster of palm trees for their wine if not oil) later sneezed these eggs to explode in this story! Eggs that a creature placed in him by copulating with him. A crammed text with all manner of the tapster’s surreal visions that swarm into your mind pell mell, in parallel with an oil company despoiling the land. As perhaps I despoil this book for the meanings’ oil that only I can tap? Thinking the world needs it. Humans walking two thousand years behind themselves, other than, of course, you or, in my case, me. Your friends disguised as creatures within this teeming of visions. “Several sharp whacks” on your peering head – as if from the previous story! Then “…tramping around the disaster area of your own mind.” Tramping, not swarming nor teeming, after all? A story with not even one leap to tap. Unless his fall from the palm tree was deliberate – as in Midsommar? Or a leap, in delayed hindsight, as the jolt of that sneeze, followed by the realisation that you were already dead before it happened!
My previous review of this author: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/296-2/
SPOILER
THE FOOL
by David Drake
“Ek neckroo say Üxwmettapempomie.”
So much I can quote from it. Spoilt for choice. Just remember the “several sharp whacks” in the previous story! So I’ll quote nothing more from THIS novelette. Meanwhile, I LOVED it, this wild and crazy shape-shifting extravaganza with old men like me, including the septuagenarian “cunning man” and his ‘apprentice’ “fool” of a boy and I, as that very cunning man, help to get his stolen horse back from another old man’s clan. A classic work of literature to cherish, with me in it, it being an apotheosis of O Henry with magic spells, and with physical artefacts to aid such spells, such as a horse-hair installation and, later, a metal pointer that we smithy into existence as if the words themselves describing it are iron-shod and real hot — and, thirdly and finally, a Babel book of spells to trap my oldster enemy and his clan into a bull leap, where his whole clan en masse become the same bull, its women’s leaping-out nipples, now erect and long, being part of it, later to be cowed and domesticated while my friend the fool gets his horse back. Sorry about all the plot spoilers, but the plot is only half of it, if that! And please do not forget the cat that only talks to me, the bull, too. And all manner of wordage that lights the sky of my lockdown. The plot is what it contains within itself NOT what happens on its surface, and that is the reason why you need to read it, TO SEE. And to hear its dialogue. Only your reading it will magick away the spell I’ve now already put on you TO read it! Who’s the fool now?
Just discovered that the Old Nathan stories (of which this is one) take place in Lewis County!
His way of working was indeed just like I have described ‘hawling’ in the past.
Fra Angelico
THE FLYING CREATURES OF FRA ANGELICO
by Antonio Tabucchi (translated by Tim Parks)
“, because the flesh is heavy and forever pulling us earthward.”
This, for me, is an important work discovered here, a blended rhapsody of this book’s fantasy soul and of a spiritual perspective upon the back of a crucifixion that emblemises many people’s raison d’être. The visionary winged creatures aligned left and right of angels, versus man’s desires whatever his spiritual oaths otherwise. I realised the first time, by dint of ‘fortuitous’ translation, that “monastery” is an assonance of ‘monstery’. This story is more than just the fantasy soul of the book, but of my own gestalt soul of it wrung, so far, from my daily findings reported back here. Earthly lockdown and our potential leap from it. In many more ways than one. In itself, without these considerations, a beautiful work of fantasy creatures and eventual communion as reunited love by whatever means possible. (And like Old Nathan in the previous story, who was the only one to hear the cat’s words, so here explicitly is also Fra Giovanni.)
This is one of Leonora’s Carrington’s paintings, that seems perfectly to match her own story below about the combined state of being blessed with fantasy wings and being earthen bounded, and, not only that, but also with the Fra Angelico story above…and with this book’s gestalt so far.
by Leonora Carrington
“Pigs have an angel.”
“Quietly Maria set down the pail of water and walked north towards the Pyramid of the Moon.”
This tale feels like a Jungian Archetype, one that I have lived through all my life, although I don’t think I have read it before.
And wherein lives a Black Mole and, in view of this book’s earlier mole king, I was somehow not surprised when it said to Juan: “Do not be afraid, Juan, this is only a first death, and you will be alive again soon.” The scenes with Maria are rhapsodic as well as dark with a hollow man that might have derived from T.S. Eliot. And a dog that brings separated pieces of your body together as gestalt…to ever return to Earth as a God, or Goddess. Perhaps the Mole was right, all along! And just like in the above Pat Murphy…. “They jumped into the fire and ascended […] to join the Evening Star.”
The story of a boy called Juan and a free-wheeling audit trail of surreal events in battling a mysogyny with promise of impossible mangoes. An Earth alive wherein one can travel, as through Nemonymous Night. Even being able to feed the Earth.
My previous review of Leonora Carrington: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-weird-4/
Cross-referenced above with ‘Trading Polaris’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/seeds-and-other-stories-ursula-pflug/#comment-19790
To be bounded or to bound: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/09/05/pigs-have-an-angel/
I reviewed the next story here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/54-2/ and below is what I wrote about it in that context…
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The Boy in the Tree – Elizabeth Hand
“Psychotics, autists, artists of the lesser rank: these could be altered by empatherapy.”
As an artist of the lesser rank, myself, and with no false modesty, I genuinely found this story difficult at first but, unlike with the Butler story, the rich and gradually acclimatisable prose from an artist of an undoubted high rank did accretively penetrate me with an absolutely gorgeous overdrive gear-change of reading beyond my normal cubic capacity. Seriously addictive – in itself as a densely prose-textured SF vision of a ley-line empathy / symbiosis (hey, this book reeks with it like a Proustian arbour!) – and in a ‘scientific robbery’ (cf the previous Okri story where this phrase originates) with resplendent, sumptuous, haunting dreams / nightmares and ‘nemonymous night’-type chameleon intra-personal swaps and connections (again, hey, this book is steeped in these things like a daisy chain of mobius-section souls). Three instances of PET-cruelty (including sexual molestation of them by a girl). Dr Harrow aptly named after the contraption in the Penal Colony. Servers and the NET. Empties and the readers, like me, gradually being cable-threaded by the Human Engineering Laboratory (HEL) into the crucial nubs and liens of this capricious science disguised as what I can only describe as a ‘rarifiction’. A Willow incident. It just had to be a Willow for the story’s pervasive Boy in the Tree, didn’t it? But eventually (no?) the only true empathy (even if scientifically enhanced) is with oneself…? This story is another major read from the Reva-Menders and their well-maintained-in-reality-pages book of word-to-brain synaptic servers. “I’m not responsible. I can’t be responsible.”
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My review of ‘Wylding Hall’ by Elizabeth Hand: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/wylding-hall-elizabeth-hand/
TV PEOPLE
by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)
“TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS”
…time itself winding down? An accidental tripswitch of translated Trip Chaos? Questions, questions, vortices of leading questions leading nowhere. Or that is how I feel, as we follow this man who somehow witnesses the TV people come into his and his wife’s apartment with an older-fashioned Sony TV of his times, TV people who are uniformly downsized from real humans, but too big to be in TVs of 1990 when this story was first published, but, equally, in hindsight, they are small enough to be people in the even larger-than-life but real TVs that prevail TODAY with 2020 vision. Appropriate, too, that the man is reading Márquez throughout this story, an author featured earlier in this book, as in his own downsizing of time this man fights against identity and memory losses, and wonders at his own ability to say brilliant things without realising it at his workplace meetings. And with the officious dependabilities such as his wife waning, this portrait of a man’s experiences is arguably and momentously the first seriously evoked example of a full-fledged co-vivid dream that we all experience today, but then in 1990 it was something quite unknown till this story was written about from within by strangely and ineluctably bigger-headed people inside your own authorial head.
Being inside a screen the symbol of our modern lockdowns. Building gradually and amorphously a perceived airplane vehicle from inside to outside to help our escape… while “roots of doubt burrow into the earth.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/haruki-murakami/ (including detailed reviews of two novels)
by Angela Carter
Leaping, as we all do, from such bubble enclosures, we can watch the creature Alice pop out from Dr Dee’s crystal ball, here also called a bubble or even glass eye or Dee’s own skull, a crystal ball of what will happen by scrying it amid this work’s other priapic stuff and ‘erotic esoterica’ and bodily clefts —
and its prophecies invoking Arcimboldo (the first Gestalt real-time reviewer, in paint, if not wordage or even collage) and today’s AI devices and other automata popping up in slow motion cartoons of the mind— also concerning Archduke Rudolph and Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, and …. before I forget, I LOVED the “stumped” joke after we heard one of Alice’s Carrollian conundrums about people losing limbs!
A scintillating caprice in free-drop through a Tower of Privies if not a gratuitous Babel in itself. A fin de siècle hinge between Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew” and the Age of Unreason! Curiouser and curiouser, this all keeps us alive by the ever seeking of answers to what never stops surrounding us… seeking cure-all or this work’s elixir … while Alice ”experimentally stretches out her tiny limbs to test the limits of the new invisible circumference around her.” (My tree photo fortuitously taken yesterday.)
MOON SONGS
by Carol Emshwiller
“‘I’m your only friend,’ she’d say. ‘I’m your keeper, I’m your jailer, I’m your everything, I’m your nothing,’ and she’d carefully place the mite in its cage…”
I’m your moon, I’m your sun (see the Elizabeth Bowen quote earlier in this review), I’m your still birth as if birth is still ever a middle, I am your stinger stung and prick, singer and sung and ear-pierced string, and “white fluid” from such a prick, and this powerful horror story discovery – doubling as a co-vivid fantasy dream – for me parallels the emergence of Alice as a mite in the previous story among its erotic esoterica, and here an elder domineering sister who co-opts the mite and calls it male and makes her younger brother nicknamed Twinkle watch her put the mite in her bra and private parts et al. Salacious implications, if reluctantly watched, and their pent-up song allows him to truly twinkle or pop out in his own way when the sororal cage is uncaged, turning mite to counterintuitively slender might. Even though he doffed the nickname itself!
“…and yet still the song went on and the people sat in their own dream, whatever it was.”
My previous review of Carol Emshwiller: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-science-fiction/#comment-347
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SHED NUMBER XII
by Victor Pelevin (translated by Andrew Bromfield)
“, and the slime-impregnated boards strained against their rusty iron hoops inside him. All of it was him.”
One shed had a Roman numeral, the others normal numbers. Amid a downbeat allotment area near prefabs, this inspiring, gestalt-respecting work is a third person singular narrative monologue of the eponymous shed’s soul from its philosophical inception of consciousness, when constructed with planks and decorated with crimson paint, and its once storage of bicycles enabled one of them to be ridden beyond the shed-soul’s own containment, at least ridden by the mind’s eye if not a real I. Till, through some trivial business deal by the various sheds’ owners it was made to store instead smelly barrels of pickled cucumbers or cabbage. Despite both bikes and barrels sporting hoops of sort, as wheels or fasteners respectively, and because our shed always became what it contained, and what contained it, a volition of self-destructive ignition didn’t stop it leaping off on a bike into the sky. (Just as I, in my own story, later used seagulls? I wish the real I, though, had used Roman numerals, instead.)
THIS REVIEW WILL NOW CONTINUE HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/807-2/