CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/work-by-the-comte-de-lautreamont-donald-barthelme-and-shirley-jackson/#comment-28139
Gradual alphabetical listing of my Barthelme reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-donald-barthelme/
Previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
A Manual for Sons
“Some fathers have only one arm. Others have an extra arm, in addition to the normal two, hidden inside their coats.”
A MANUAL FOR SONS
“Some fathers have only one arm. Others have an extra arm, in addition to the normal two, hidden inside their coats.”
This is, of course, a substantive tour de force, a recitative and incantation for Fathers, that needs reading aloud especially by old fathers like me. Peppered with political incorrectness, sometimes shocking. Priapic and utterly something else that can only be defined by an oblique reading of this mad monologue. Addressing the sons of these fathers, and what can be done to match the painful humanity in all of us. From the ‘father fang’ to the javelin of an elbow to the gestalt of All-Father to the dandling of daughters, even though the work is the missing spoke for the still turning wheel of sons. From the ‘What we’re teaching our sons?’ of Owen Booth HERE to (in this Barthelme work’s final sentence) the Anti-Natalism of Thomas Ligotti HERE.
“Will he again place nails in your mother, in her elbows…”
CHABLIS
“She looks most lovable when she’s wet, when she’s just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel.”
Seems to be a precursor to the above story’s ‘dandling’, when the daughter is now much younger and her mother wants her husband, the narrator, to buy the daughter a dog, but the narrator remains cynically matter-of-fact in his straitened finances and drinks Chablis and smokes while others run for exercise outside. A short exercise in deadpan wisdom from the point of view of a ‘man’ as black sheep, after ditching a car. Gives more of a slant on 20th century social history than banks of books. Change is bliss?
A SHOWER OF GOLD
“The absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it.”
Peterson sounds a bit like the word ‘President’ as in the US President, when US Presidents were sane. Peterson is a jobbing sculptor who is to appear in a TV show called “Who Am I?” A tale of extreme existentialism, nausea, and the power of absurdity beyond even the persistent pursuit of the process I once called Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing. A tale involving chopping works of art into two with a sledge hammer, a cat-piano the absurd description of which defies disbelief, a nice old lady who places a blue sticker on Peterson’s elbow, and much else. Somehow, a communal psychotherapy of all its readers with each other, in collusion with this tale or vice versa. And it all seems to work!
“…’and my father a shower of gold.’”
OVERNIGHT TO MANY DISTANT CITIES
“…’R.H.I.P.!’ or, Rank Has Its Privileges.”
…as doth death, I guess. A sort of inverse Droit du Seigneur?
A monologue of the odd goings on in various named cities, sometimes with his wife and daughter? And sometimes not? About love, an army of generals, a Matisse and a Schwitters, and much else, if not, explicitly, the book by the Comte de Lautréamont!
“Again in Paris, the hotel was the Montalemebert . . .”
REBECCA
The tale of Rebecca Lizard who can’t change her name for Kafkaesque reasons, and she is a ‘lesbian’ whose lover, Hilda, admits, one day, she dislikes Rebecca’s slightly greenish skin, another factor than can’t be changed for genetic reasons. A tale that deals with the prevailing nature of love whatever its ups and downs. Told in a leisurely way of lizards and ‘lesbians’, pork with red cabbage, plus the revelatory edge of experimental prose that is “tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.” Indeed, HILDA IN REBECCA has INERADICABLE tattooed, I have just discovered. Or vice versa.
THE SCHOOL
“It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something.”
If you take the comma away, the above sentence takes on its intended meaning, I feel, as if a name’s assonance could make a refugee kid to be adopted nearer being killed than any other kid? In this school of our own kids, everything seems to turn moribund. From the snakes they fed to the herbs they watered. Even pupils and their relations liable to such fell fates. The ending made me laugh out loud. A rare event.
ARIA
Amazingly, having just read (HERE) an hour ago THE BUS by Shirley Jackson, this short Joycean monologue about childhood with all manner of haunting obliquities, of subsequent adult tethering, is an uncanny resemblance. Even the children are “Out of scale. They came and went. Doors banging.”
Did the bus driver in THE BUS sleep with the Harper as minstrel of the Aria while asleep?
THE BABY
The baby that relentlessly tears pages from books. I never finished it. Although I wanted to. Sometimes I think readers of certain books need protective goggles.
AFFECTION
“…he’s crushed to learn that she [Claire] is married to Sarah.”
A story from 1987 about a triangle that presages our own times. With fortune telling shrink and a piano player who seems immune. Written in confused staccato and then non-staccato paragraphs like our lives now. It means nothing but, in hindsight, another reader might find everything ‘they’ know in it.
“Maybe it’s everywhere, Claire said. A pandemic.”
OPENING
The growth of a play in the playwright’s eyes as it is being rehearsed towards becoming a critical success, with all the niceties of costume and pre-curtain-rising music, and the gems of lines to be refrained forever more. Like Oscar Wilde’s moon and its sensed atmosphere in different eras. And his next play is about someone called Luna.
O, Penning a Play is like making human life centre stage as human life’s sole purpose.