A review by arirang
The Things We Don't Do by Lorenza García, Nick Caistor, Andrés Neuman
3.0
"In the opening lines, the life of a short story is at stake, in the last lines its resurrection"
"The resolution of the plot and the end of the text keep up an invisible tug of war. If the first prevails, the structure will tend towards Poe. If the second prevails, it will tend towards Chekhov. If the result is a tie, something new might arise."
"From the story with a twist to the story with a doubt."
These are three of Andres Neuman's 48 dodecalogues (12 rules in 4 sets)- maxims for the "post-modern short story." and included as an appendix to this, his first short story collection to appear in English, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia.
From his English appearances to date, Neuman is clearly a very versatile author - from the lengthy intellectual and (pseudo-) historical Traveller of the Century (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/376534463), followed by Talking to Ourselves (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/873330219), and now this his short story collection.
Others of his maxims make it clear that brevity is important to Neuman in writing short stories (e.g. "revise.reduce") and his slim volume of 170 pages fits in 40 stories, the longest 11 pages and many much shorter.
This isn't quite the micro fiction form in which Lydia Davis excels, but one can tell from the maxims what Neuman is trying to achieve - stories with a captivating opening, which proceed as rapidly as possible to a revelatory ending, but one that often creates doubt rather than resolves it.
The collection isn't intended to have an overriding theme ("the extreme freedom of a book of short stories derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.") but the most common and successful threads tend to be troubled relationships, between lovers, colleagues and rivals.
And at their best the stories hinge on a wonderfully written line or lines. Examples include:
A man who is trying to become like his best friend, with whom is wife is having an affair, but sees her affair not as a betrayal but rather "I am well aware my wife adores me, so much so that the poor thing sleeps with him, the man I wish to be,..., getting accustomed to his body, his character and his tastes so that she will be as comfortable and happy as can be when I am like him and we can leave him alone"
Or a woman who goes to a 2nd hand shop to buy a coat for a husband as a birthday present, itself a strong implicit indication of a deterioration in their relationship, only to find the new coat she bought him last year hanging there, which she of course buys back "to give him a surprise".
Or two formerly very close friends, almost twin-like in their relationship, who now "on the rare occasions where they have succeeded in arranging to meet, perhaps offended at how long it has taken the other to make a move, neither of them has turned up".
Or this, contrasting the characters of two literary colleagues who fierce rivalry is based on the misunderstanding that they both have the same goal: "Nothing could be further from the truth. Vilchez aspired to a prestige that excluded all others, a sort of moral leadership in the long-term. Rinaldi on the other hand desired...to be recognised as quickly as possible. One of them, it could be said, hoped to win the lottery. The other hoped all his colleagues would lose it, in order to be remembered as the only one who had not stooped to place a bet."
But several of the stories - particularly the "longer" ones (which typically means anything over 5 pages in this collection) -didn't work for me - in Neuman's terms they didn't come to life and the last line failed to resurrect them.
And the deliberate lack of a coherent theme meant that the collection didn't come together as a whole. In part, I think this reflects my own relative dislike for the short story form - except in the hands of a master like Borges or Lydia Davis, or where the whole coheres to form a novel (e.g. Ogawa's Revenge https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/945236603 ).
Nevertheless, and as I said in my review of Talking to Ourselves, Neuman is clearly an important new voice in English translation, and so far all of his books have been worthwhile even if not always to my personal taste.
"The resolution of the plot and the end of the text keep up an invisible tug of war. If the first prevails, the structure will tend towards Poe. If the second prevails, it will tend towards Chekhov. If the result is a tie, something new might arise."
"From the story with a twist to the story with a doubt."
These are three of Andres Neuman's 48 dodecalogues (12 rules in 4 sets)- maxims for the "post-modern short story." and included as an appendix to this, his first short story collection to appear in English, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia.
From his English appearances to date, Neuman is clearly a very versatile author - from the lengthy intellectual and (pseudo-) historical Traveller of the Century (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/376534463), followed by Talking to Ourselves (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/873330219), and now this his short story collection.
Others of his maxims make it clear that brevity is important to Neuman in writing short stories (e.g. "revise.reduce") and his slim volume of 170 pages fits in 40 stories, the longest 11 pages and many much shorter.
This isn't quite the micro fiction form in which Lydia Davis excels, but one can tell from the maxims what Neuman is trying to achieve - stories with a captivating opening, which proceed as rapidly as possible to a revelatory ending, but one that often creates doubt rather than resolves it.
The collection isn't intended to have an overriding theme ("the extreme freedom of a book of short stories derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.") but the most common and successful threads tend to be troubled relationships, between lovers, colleagues and rivals.
And at their best the stories hinge on a wonderfully written line or lines. Examples include:
A man who is trying to become like his best friend, with whom is wife is having an affair, but sees her affair not as a betrayal but rather "I am well aware my wife adores me, so much so that the poor thing sleeps with him, the man I wish to be,..., getting accustomed to his body, his character and his tastes so that she will be as comfortable and happy as can be when I am like him and we can leave him alone"
Or a woman who goes to a 2nd hand shop to buy a coat for a husband as a birthday present, itself a strong implicit indication of a deterioration in their relationship, only to find the new coat she bought him last year hanging there, which she of course buys back "to give him a surprise".
Or two formerly very close friends, almost twin-like in their relationship, who now "on the rare occasions where they have succeeded in arranging to meet, perhaps offended at how long it has taken the other to make a move, neither of them has turned up".
Or this, contrasting the characters of two literary colleagues who fierce rivalry is based on the misunderstanding that they both have the same goal: "Nothing could be further from the truth. Vilchez aspired to a prestige that excluded all others, a sort of moral leadership in the long-term. Rinaldi on the other hand desired...to be recognised as quickly as possible. One of them, it could be said, hoped to win the lottery. The other hoped all his colleagues would lose it, in order to be remembered as the only one who had not stooped to place a bet."
But several of the stories - particularly the "longer" ones (which typically means anything over 5 pages in this collection) -didn't work for me - in Neuman's terms they didn't come to life and the last line failed to resurrect them.
And the deliberate lack of a coherent theme meant that the collection didn't come together as a whole. In part, I think this reflects my own relative dislike for the short story form - except in the hands of a master like Borges or Lydia Davis, or where the whole coheres to form a novel (e.g. Ogawa's Revenge https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/945236603 ).
Nevertheless, and as I said in my review of Talking to Ourselves, Neuman is clearly an important new voice in English translation, and so far all of his books have been worthwhile even if not always to my personal taste.