Lindsay Stern's Town of Shadows

I don’t know what I expected from Lindsay Stern’s novella, Town of Shadows, but it wasn’t what I got.

Waiting for my car to be fixed, sitting in the dealership’s plastic chair with all the other strange folk who drive cars that don’t properly work, I flicked on my Kindle and decided I’d read a few pages while I waited. Luckily for me, the wait ended up being much longer than expected.

It’s not a long read and so I was able to read it in about ninety minutes, but those are powerful pages and an emotional ninety minutes.

It’s a peculiar book, relying on more than sentences and stories to give you the life it holds within. Full of odd math problems and experimental notations and lists and poetry and definitions that seem all wrong, Stern disorients the reader by dropping us in the middle of this town where nothing is quite what it seems to be, where absurdity and magic are just a skipped breath away.

For a long time the mayor required all citizens to wear small wooden cages
on their heads. The idea was to trap their thoughts before they wafted
behind another’s eyes, between another’s ears. At first the results were
satisfactory. Then came the complications: the cages filled until the mayor
could no longer distinguish one face from the next. Through the bars he
discerned only light — red for politicians, for philosophers bright blue, and
for children the glint of candleflame. They were happily blind, watching
their thoughts unfold before them as the objects of the world ticked on.

It is these little touches of magic that grabbed me early on, held me close as it whispered the life of this strange little town full of strange humans doing almost human things that were just a few shades off.

Lately, Pierre has felt his brain expanding. Growing lighter, as if swollen with
air. This morning, a thrust against the roof of his skull. Last night, a pressure
in his jaw. Before long, he suspects, the whole machine will burst. Words will
trickle through his ears, scamper back into the world. So as not to forget
them, he has built a lexicon:

Mirror, n. A palindrome.

Loneliness, n. Wordlessness.

Indigestion, n. Swallowed noise.

Making the disorientation begin to feel natural, I found myself accepting Stern’s definitions, agreeing with them, assimilating them into the fabric of my life. While the novella shifts and bends reality, like dancing shadows, it manages to grow in realness and even the oddity of this town of shadows feels right.

It feels true.

And as I sat there reading, my car forgotten, the people around me just noise, the world Stern created began to collapse and my heart collapsed with it. All that reality she wove so tightly together, making a world like one I would dream of if I only knew to dream that way, began to unravel and it hurt. It hit me hard, harder than I expected.

I was caught in that town with them and I never even realized, never saw it happening until the walls were all crumbling and then I was disoriented in a new way, falling back into the world beyond the page, where I had to go talk to a mechanic about what he did and then drive that car home to see what the rest of the day held for me.

I didn’t know who Lindsay Stern was before opening Town of Shadows, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget now that I’ve closed it.

Eclectic Poetry from New Voices

When it comes to the already fringe element of literary magazines, a strictly poetry review is a bit of an outsider, hidden in the tall grasses, mixed in with the thorns and thistles of the terrestrial realm. One such lone wolf is the Hiram Poetry Review. In the exercise of gauging the territory of poetry and evaluating the submission pile, however, this Review is no greenhorn. In fact, some might argue that concerning those magazines that stick strictly to the modes of poetry and poetry review, HPR is the finest citizen working. Though perhaps little-known, HPR thrives on a high standard and discovers some of America’s finest poets.

The annual offering of the Review, Issue Seventy-Three, released in April, offers a nod to the tenure one of its prior editors, shares “eclectic poetry from new voices,” and provides four interesting reviews on poets who, at least for me, would go unnoticed without the attention of HPR.

David Fratus, Professor Emeritus, of the Hiram College English Department, graces the cover of the issue in the form of archival photo from, as it appears, his teaching days. Dr. Fratus would take over primary editorship from the Review’s founder in the fall of 1974, and hold that position (later sharing the job with another Hiram professor, Carol Donley), until the Spring of 1984. For those interested in the history of the Review, seeing a new poem (he contributed several over the years) by Dr. Fratus is satisfying. That it is a good poem makes it all the more so.

HPR’s current editor, Dr. Willard Greenwood, has put out many satisfying issues since he took over in 2002, making number seventy-three a bit of milestone for him. He seems to truly be committed to both publishing interesting work, a kind of “know it when I see it” attitude, and finding good writers for the poetry reviews at the end of each issue. The background of poets in this newest publication range from a Lithuanian high school senior, to the founding member of a surfing club, to an unauthorized biographer of Sylvia Plath, while not limiting itself wholly to the rare and exotic by featuring several more widely published writers.

Under Greenwood’s tenure, one never knows exactly what she or he might get from a poem in HPR.

Most impressive is the rooted commitment to the “review” part of the Review. At a recent poetry reading at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, a winner of a poetry contest expressed a poignant line concerning the contemporary world of poetry authorship, “Poets talk about audience like they actually expect there to be one.” Authors, Bruce Dethlefsen, Kristina Marie Darling, David Hernandez, and Jack Gilbert can rest assured that anyone who reads the aptly written reviews in HPR will be interested in getting a copy of their books.

The Hiram Poetry Review has sharpened my senses with regard to poetry in the present day — its appearance in times contemporary. Once a year, it is a chance to observe the fashion and manners of today’s emerging writers. Without reservation, I suggest contacting Dr. Greenwood to purchase the most recent HPR, Issue Seventy-Three. You’ll also be happy to find that nearly all past issues are archived at HPR’s website.

Human Beings Are Inherently Ridiculous: A Review of Milan Kundera's The Farewell Waltz

People who know me might find it a little hard to believe that I’ve never read any of Milan Kundera’s fiction. Heck, I even find it a little hard to believe myself. I read a lot, and I should have read Kundera by now. However, I haven’t. I am a bit late to the party, or rather, to The Farewell Party (sometimes translated as The Farewell Waltz, which is not the title on my copy and would ruin the attempt at wit in this sentence).

The Farewell Waltz/Party centers around a beautiful nurse, Ruzena, who has been impregnated by a married jazz musician at a fertility clinic. Ruzena sees the baby as a way out of the banality of her life. However, the jazz musician, being of another opinion, sees it as a yoke that will end his life.

Of course, before you get too set in views that could be easily taken, I should tell you that the nurse may actually have been impregnated by a young mechanic that she can’t stand. In fact, after deciding that she will not give up her baby, the following scene occurs with her and the young mechanic:

The young man grasped her hand. “Don’t go yet!”
Ruzena turned her eyes toward the ceiling in desperation.
The young man said: “Everything would be different if we got married. Your father couldn’t stop us. We’d have a family.”
“I don’t want a family,” Ruzena said sharply. “I’d kill myself before I’d have a baby!”

Also, there are a great deal more people involved in The Farewell Party than just Ruzena, her jazz musician, and her mechanic.  We also have a benevolent fertility doctor who has been injecting women with his own sperm to combat ugliness in the population, a formerly imprisoned dissident who holds himself above everyone else but really is just as bad, a saintly but somewhat foolish rich American, and a number of other strange beings.

For me, this is the real magic of Kundera’s writing. Kundera writes a number of intricate characters that are all extremely interconnected in a very short space. But, that alone would not be as impressive if it was not for how these intricacies and interactions come off. Really, everyone ends up looking pretty idiotic.

After all, all human beings are inherently ridiculous. It is only when we are full of our own self-importance that we don’t see that. However, at the same time, our follies are an extremely serious thing. I mean, what else do we have? Kundera seems to recognize this in The Farewell Party. All the characters are ridiculous in some way or another, but Kundera treats them simultaneously (or sometimes alternatingly) as foolish and serious. They are flawed, but so is everyone else. Stretching out over all of this is a constant sense of tenderness that Kundera seems to feel for his characters, through all flaws and virtues.

Perhaps it was just a moment of weakness on the part of the Lord when He permitted Noah to save himself in the ark, thus allowing the human story to continue. Can we be certain that God never regretted this moment of weakness? But whether He repented or not, it was too late. God cannot make Himself ridiculous by continually reversing His decisions. Perhaps it was God Himself who planted the idea in Herod’s mind? Can we rule out such a possibility?”

Bartleff shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.

Herod was a king. He was not responsible merely for himself. He couldn’t very well tell himself, as I do: Let others do as they please, I refuse to propagate the race. Herod was a king and knew that it was up to him to make decisions not only for himself, but for many others, and he decided on behalf of all mankind that man would cease repeating himself. This was how the Massacre of the Innocents came about. Herod was not led by the base motives ascribed to him traditionally. Herod was animated by the noblest longing to liberate the world from the clutches of mankind.”

I rather like your interpretation of Herod,” said Bartleff. “In fact, I like it so much that from now on I will think of the Massacre of the Innocents the same way as you do. But don’t forget that at the very time Herod decided to do away with mankind, a little boy was born in Bethlehem who eluded his knife. And this boy grew up and told people that only one thing was needed to make life worthwhile: to love one another. Perhaps Herod was better educated and more experienced. Jesus was actually a young man, and probably knew little about life. Maybe all his teaching can be explained by his youth and inexperience. His naïveté, if you like. And yet he was right.

I admit, I’m a sucker for this kind of take on humanity. Kundera presents it so well: tight yet effortless sentences, a story that manages to focus on an entire crew of characters at once, and sadness mixed with laughter mixed with hope mixed with fatality.

There is really nothing else to say about The Farewell Waltz/Party other than I was very impressed and should have read it years ago. If this book is representative of Kundera’s work, then I need to spend a lot more time with him. I think that conveys my reading experience better than anything else I could say.

Aren't Revolutions Built Upon Manifestos?

Years ago, I sat in Day One of my first fiction workshop, a newbie writer worried about appearing too newbie. The workshop leader wanted to know about us. What writers we liked. Some of our favorite books. My workshop mates tossed out the expected names like Garcia Marquez, Borges, Saunders, Bender, Barthelme and Bukowski and Carver, Hemingway and Nabokov and Kafka. My underarms ran with sweat. When my turn came, I wanted to express my individuality, and maybe my mental stamina too, so I said that I liked Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cue the crickets and the blank stares. The workshop leader said “Okay” in a way that sounded disappointed. Like: Okaaaaaaaaay, thanks. Next person please. Since then, I’ve continued to get the same reaction when I mention it. So what is with all the literary hating on this novel? Some writers are quite forceful in their dislike. Others will temper their negative reaction by admitting that they liked Rand’s The Fountainhead, however, and liked it even better in its movie form (the 1949 classic starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal).

After all, who doesn’t inwardly cheer when Howard Roark blows up the building he designed rather than see it bastardized by feeble minds?

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the two obvious turn-offs with Atlas Shrugged, starting with its size. Sure, it’s bloated. Wikipedia has it as number eight on their longest-novel list, punching in at about 565,000 words, topping both David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (#11, at 484,000) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, but edged out by Leo Tolstoy at #7 with his poster-child of heft, War and Peace (587,000). Novels this big simply don’t play well these days. We’re an attention-deficit, multi-tasking society of over-caffeinated busybodies. Give us the Cliff’s Notes, please, downloadable to Kindle, teen vampires and boy wizards helpful but not required. I’ll agree that a good editor could have trimmed this beast down without harming its essence, but that didn’t happen, and so a few more trees were sacrificed to Rand’s verbose tendencies. New ones have grown up in their places; time to move on. To me, the size of this novel is much more a function of a vast plot scale than verbosity. Who would dare tackle a colossal topic like the disintegration of society, across industries, from coast to coast?

While there is no shortage of apocalyptic novels, most narrow their scope to a story that can be comfortably told in 60,000 words or so. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for example, we never find out what destroyed society — we just follow a man and his son on a bleak, frightening journey of survival. Rand, on the other hand, chronicles how something too big to fail can indeed fail. That’s going to take more than a few chapters, people. Talk about a big canvas to paint!

And second: what about the pages and pages of Rand’s individual-centric philosophical diatribes sprinkled throughout the novel? For example, mystery man John Galt’s big radio-broadcast soliloquy near the end of the book covers fifty-six pages of small typeface in the 1999 edition. While admittedly being too swollen (see above), I’d argue that it’s necessary to the story. The entrepreneurial characters that go AWOL in the book were successful enough that they could have survived, in some lesser way, the grievous actions of bumbling government bureaucrats, if all they were interested in were survival. But they were idealists, damn it, and mustn’t all idealists spout their ideals? Aren’t revolutions built upon manifestos?

In my opinion, it aids the credibility of the story to understand the deep-rooted motivations and passions of Henry Reardon, Dagny Taggart and the rest of the shruggers. It helps make their outrage palpable and their extreme actions believable. Does it come in chunks too big to swallow? Yes. I believe it unnecessarily taxes the reader when the top story disappears for dozens of pages, so maybe Rand loses a few craft points here, but for God’s sake, let her keep her ideals. They’re the nuclear fuel of this whole sloppy brilliant mess of a novel.

I’ve come to accept the fact that I’m one of the few that will ever read and enjoy this book, as a fan of her literary accomplishment, not of her philosophy (the other supporters of Atlas Shrugged seem to be the right-wing followers of her Objectivist beliefs). I’m still satisfied with my response given back in that workshop years ago, defending this unruly novel, and equally dissatisfied with my recent non-response to a friend who asked me why I hadn’t read Infinite Jest yet. Within a span of milliseconds, I considered answering “too long.” I thought of saying “too many big lumps of momentum-killing thoughtwandering,” but I was not about to become a hypocrite. Instead, I just shrugged.