June 18, 2020
I read a story from Ireland in Best Fiction of Europe 2019. Six pages divided into small sections which followed one woman’s life from early adolescence to her immanent death at fifty. Third person, stylized diction and syntax (tons of alliteration and odd verbs; the sinful ‘to be’ never makes an appearance giving it a poetic tone in a realist mode that sometimes betrays itself).
Each small section presents a traumatic incident from the protagonist’s life. An encounter with a pedophile flasher, enduring/experiencing an abortion, a sister’s rape, breast cancer, and menopause. The story is a life. The form betrays the life, because there is no life to connect the incidents. Better to have focused on one of these fragments? I began intrigued, but soon felt like I had read this story before . . . perhaps better to say that the writer failed. Aren’t we all standardized?
I’m writing in F’s room. I hate this room. The window rattles. Plastic film covers the glass to retain the heat. F. never uses the room. I sleep here when I need rest. I made the bed and remembered my time at a coffee shop downtown. How quickly the man hired with me mastered steaming milk and pouring shapes. Even after hundreds of hours of practice and evenings spent imagining the motions, I couldn’t do it.
Me: His hand shook. They always had. As a child, he could never paint his figurines. Now, he holds out his hands, so customer’s can see the tremor.
“You must drink a lot of coffee,” they nearly always say.
The owner shared his name.
(I didn’t want to put this plastic up, because it looks ugly from the outside and made me feel embarrassed. I argued with A. about it, but she insisted, because this was the room where F. would sleep. It couldn’t be cold. A domestic micro-drama. Nearly all my fears and desires are shallow).
